Khalid's Initial Thoughts On Vue.js

The RIMdev team composition is a unique blend of disciplines forged in the crucible of time. We have backend developers, frontend developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, and data engineers. With that cauldron of experience, it isn’t a suprise that their are a multitude of opinions about the best way to build software in 2017. From my perspective, here is a short list of consensus:

1. User experience über alles (UX is king).
2. Centralizing and “Normalizing” data access via APIs.
3. Thin clients with limited business logic is ideal.
4. Speed is a feature.
5. Static site generation whenever possible.

Open questions:

1. Do we want to exclusively build SPAs?
2. Which client-side frameworks / libraries to use? (Angular, React, and/or Vue.js)
3. When should we move to ASP.NET Core? (I think we can soon)
4. Docker?

This post focuses on the client-side questions and specifically my thoughts on Vue.js.

Do We Want To Exclusively Build SPAs?

SPAs stir up a tempest of emotions in me. The first emotion is excitement:

“Cool, a new tool! It will solve all my problems and I love a challenge.”

The second emotion is dread:

“What if everything goes wrong and this makes everything worse?“.

Caution being the last emotion:

“I should think about this…”

Should we build only SPAs? The short answer is no, but the long answer is more complicated.

For Ritter Insurance Marketing, there are two kinds of web properties our team builds: Marketing Sites and Applications. For marketing properties, it makes sense to sparingly use JavaScript in the form of components. Components give the appearance of a dynamic site while enhancing an otherwise static experience. This blog is a good example of that. Our search component is written by Nathan and it works amazingly. Applications tend to have more interactions and center around complex resources. Applications is where it makes sense to leverage a SPA approach.

My Opinion

To provide a productive and enjoyable user experience, we should build an application that leverages client-side features. When building marketing sites, a JavaScript heavy or exclusive experience may detract from our goals and be counter productive.

How do we provide a great application user experience? We want to start by picking a library or framework.

Which Client-side Framework?

As of writing this post, there are three obvious contenders. I don’t feel as a team we have to use one framework mutually exclusive of the others: Angular, React, and Vue.js. The one that is my personal favorite is Vue.js. Why?

1. Has a powerful yet simple model. No wondering if I need a provider, service, or factory. Also, no Fluxing yourself up.
2. The difference between an instance and component are minimal, so working with either is an easy mental shift.
3. Two-way binding makes for clear JavaScript-only logic.
4. Implicit proxies utilizing this is awesome magic.
5. Instance/Component structure is easy with properties like methods, watch, data, and my favorite computed.
6. Did I mention reusable components?
7. An opt-in philosophy that helps avoid The Big Rewrite risks.
8. Lots of plain old JavaScript (and by old, I mean ES6).
9. Vue-CLI is nice.
10. Vue-loader to combine HTML and JavaScript in one file for compilation.
11. Composition is a strong concept with components definied on the Vue.js instance.

Those are some of my personal highlights with my admittedly short time with Vue.js. Ultimately, I admire Vue.js and its opt-in approach. Choosing when it makes sense to use a component, an entire SPA approach, or even nothing at all gets a big thumbs up. Other frameworks come across as forcing you to drink directly from their philisophical Kool-Aid firehose. Vue.js asks that you sip at your own pace :).