Looking back over my career, my involvement in frontend/graphical development has always been limited. In terms of graphical work I’ve mostly developed thick client applications using Java or .NET, or developing applications (really services) that generate something graphical (images or pdfs for example) and serve that content from a server. I’ve even developed the odd game tetris and pong. I’ve never really been interested in HTML/CSS coding that you would usually find in a typical business application, I found it quite annoying really, having to deal with multiple browser support, fiddling with CSS, going crazy trying to figure out how “inline-block” works. All of this work was typically done by the ”frontend guy” (or girl!). However now that I’m working as a freelancer there is no frontend developer that I can depend on to get the work done and deliver the product, there’s only me. So I need to buckle up, put on my frontend hat and learn some frontend frameworks. The question was, what’s new these days for frontend development? Which are the popular frameworks?
Most articles that I’ve read in regards to modern web application frameworks typically mention three frameworks - Angular, React and Vue. Vue is not as mature as React and Angular so I was a bit hesitant to learn it. React caught my eye as it has been readily adopted by the community and has a large amount of employment opportunities. Looking into the framework, certain concepts seemed familiar to me specifically - component/container hierarchy, state and properties for maintaining application state as well as exchanging data between components and containers as well as life cycle hooks. On a slightly more technical note, differentiating between functional and stateful components is also nice, making the purpose of each component clear. I also liked how React is purely a framework for controlling the front end, allowing me to decide which libraries are used for integrating with other services. Considering all of the above my choice was clear, it’s time to learn React!
In order to wrap my head around React and modern Javascript features I decided to take a course on Udemy. This is the first time I decided to do so and was quite impressed with the content. The instructor discussed React topics in depth and the coverage was excellent. The only complaint about the course is that quite a bit of time was spent implementing CSS styles, I would prefer if the CSS style sheets were just attached so students could download them (later sections of the course did so). I feel that this course was a more then adequate launch-pad for starting React development.
In conclusion, so far my React development experience has been quite positive. I’ve quickly learned most of the concepts involved, and have been able to piece together applications quite quickly. The seemless feel to SPA applications is also quite nice, rather then having the server do all of the work (i.e. server side rendering, JSPs for example). Will I bother to learn other frontend Javascript frameworks? Maybe. But for now React is doing the job perfectly fine.