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Reflection journal #10: The problem when choosing frontend framework

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When I start a new web application project, there are two big things I need to consider. A backend framework and a frontend framework. Choosing the right one will improve the web’s performance a lot.

It’s always a hot topic when talking about frontend technologies,. There are many popular frontend framework such as React or Angular, these frameworks are used in lots of modern web applications. Beside React and Angular, there are lots of new framework being released every year.

Even if you don’t use React or Angular, you stil know it. But to make it easier to work with Flask, I decided to use Vue.

At this point, Vue may sounds a lot strange to you. I didn’t know its existence until I started working with Laravel. I was wondering why Laravel didn’t choose to use React or Angular but instead using Vue.

I thought I would struggle with using a new frontend framework but as it turned out, Vue is really easy to use. You don’t even need to know about JSX or ES2015, just a little knowledge about JavaScript and HTML. With Vue, I can manipulate the DOM using Virtual DOM a lot easier rather than using Jquery or Vanilla JavaScript. Everytime you change the varible X, the X * 2 operation will also change accordingly. It has state management can be used from simple to complex applications. And it’s in real time!

Who is behind Vue?

When talking about Angular, the first thing come to your mind must be Google, React is created by Facebook. But no one heard of Vue before, so many people might think that it may not last long. The person created Vue is Evan You and I believe that he will make Vue shine. He used to worked at Meteor (JavaScript web framework) and Google. And there are lots of people in the community also support Vue by making contributions. Hopefully in the next 2, 3 years, when taking about Vue, people won’t go What is that??

Flask and Vue

So when I used Flask together with Vue, I realized that I can work on the frontend really easy, instead of using AJAX, I can just use axios with vue and it still does the same thing but with painless way of writing. In this way I can get a frontend code up and run in just a few seconds.

Why not Angular?

Hmm, Angular is great but the problem is it uses typescript (it gets slower because you have to compile it to JavaScript) and is a lot complicated to use when compare to React or Vue.

Why not React?

React uses JSX and JSX is a lot harder to understand. While Vue uses normal HTML and JS.