My Frontend Adventure (2021)

What is the best way to get started with Frontend development in 2021?

Every time I start looking at the current state of Frontend tools it starts to freak me out.

The start

I decided to bite the bullet and VueJS felt alluring.

$ npx create-vue-app

Lo & Behold! I have an app with has around 100+ vulnerabilities.

I try to update and --force update the deps and I still have 70 vulnerabilities left.

I will be honest with you, it does not feel good to create a fresh app with so many issues preinstalled.

What did I do next?

$ rm -rf my-vue-app

No point in using it.

So how do you develop a Frontend app in 2021?

I decided to go back to basics

I am gonna try and create one from scratch and run with it. I think my needs are simple enough. (famous last words)

  • Create static html pages
  • Minify my html & JS where possible
  • Package it into a neat folder/zip file
  • Test any and all code I might have
  • Ajax interactivity.

Maybe it IS too much to ask or maybe it isn't.

I did some quick look about and I plan to check out the following tools:

  • npm scripts as build system
  • Bulma for lightweight CSS styling
  • Jest for testing code
  • UmbrellaJS for jquery-like interactivity & helpers
  • Babel/Typescript for sane default language. I want to use a statically typed language if I can, would make life easier.

Conclusion

So that's about it!

If I ever go down this path, I will keep you posted on how I fared.

If not... Then turns out that string interpolation into HTML templates with Python is lot more practical than spending time on npm stuff.