The Composeable Javascript Web

The future is of the web will have faster JS in more places - It's things like ES6 and Typescript make excited to write JS again.

I'm ready to move on, I'm ready for a composeable web where shared libraries are not a chore to maintain. I'm ready for the end twitter bootstrap and jquery. I'm excited about the possibility and success of React native and Electron. I love to see progressive, lazy loaded, locally cached and incredibly fast apps with working browser history.

Where I'm @

I build fairly classic WSGI webapps with Python/Flask/ on Google App Engine + CDN for mostly everything - it's powerful, fast and simple to develop. AppEngine means if I can pay for scaling if I need to, the CDN reduced AppEngine static costs to near nil. These days I do most of my front end with Bootstrap and jQuery - because it's straightforward and speed of development (not application speed) is my biggest priority.

It took a bit of bouncing around to land on a stack I've stuck with.

LAMP -> ABAP -> + [ nginx/HAProxy] -> Perl -> AppEngine -> Python -> GoLang

Conceptually I've always been kind of excited by Node.js - but I don't find myself going to much in my professional life. I've found the Node.js community has some prolific anti-patterns and NPM was slow. Yarn takes away some of things that have struck me as kind of strange about NPM (determinastic installs, caching and linking mainly).

Insert React

I've used various JS frameworks over the years to handle ajax or make front end dev easier but I've never felt comfortable devoting the time/resources completely to an encompassing framework like Angular / Ember. The target always seams to be moving faster then I'm willing to commit to.

React is stable, backed by real developer $$ (lets be real without a major backer these frameworks all end up dying) and solves a real problem anyone who has built more then one webbapp run into - reusable composeable components. That is stable reusable html sections with dynamic elements. Even without React I expect web components like JS is here to stay. Because of the adoption of React, the React / JSX community has lots of resources, variation on style and problem solving and that really makes it exciting to dive into React.

The Plan

  • Build the same blog a couple times to wrap my head around React
  • Decide if it is worth it to go with Typescript. (And get in bed with Microsoft)
  • Is it time to migrate my frontend work to React?