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.