Evan You, creator of Vue.js, writes about the framework's launch and design, as well as JavaScript build tools like Gulp and Grunt.
HN commenters recommend his Vue.js re-introduction post as a thorough, clear way to understand the framework's concepts and get started quickly.
I was enjoying lurking, reading some of the freak out around what amounts to spending a day or a week learning a new framework. Whether you believe that this JS theatre is good or bad, learning new concepts and solutions is never a waste of time, even if only to internally validate some other method. But if you thought that being a competent software engineer only required a one-time, upfront educational cost you probably got into the wrong field.
But throughout all this I was wondering who would come out and mention Vue.js. While my own current preference is CLJS and reagent/re-frame, I feel like this largely unknown framework should get some representation.
(Disclaimer: I am not claiming this is the best framework out there, but it is very nice and I believe a great alternative for many of the commenters here who are coming from Angular, trying to figure out where to turn next, but not wanting to toss years of experience.)
If you come from Angular and like it's declarative markup but don't care for the outdated architecture, Vue.js[1] is worth looking at. It's beautifully clean and blazingly fast (v-dom under the hood). If you are willing to use a Webpack or Browserify loader you get a very straightforward single file component style[2], similar to a web component, where you can easily mix and match style (scoped or not), script, and markup language of choice. The script side of the component looks remarkably similar to React if the render function was replaced…
Gulp seems more like a feature and less like a build system. In fact: http://blog.evanyou.me/2013/12/29/gulp-piping/ and https://github.com/wearefractal/vinyl-fs
Grunt works just fine. Make is probably ok once you learn it. It is a shame that we as a community don't take time to create amazing tutorials for our older tools like we do with our newer ones.
I think the main issue ends up being that github has created a double edged sword in open source dev land. You have people creating projects just so they can earn stars and thus resume fodder. This ends up creating packages with no maintainers and multiple projects that do the same thing. I mean really, how many different string parsing npm libraries do you need?
I really like VueJS and I actually think it is a pretty safe choice. While it has been gaining a lot of momentum recently (especially in the Laravel community were it has become the default frontend framework), it has actually been around for well over 2 years. Evan talks about the stability of the project more here: http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/
Another really important point is that Evan is able to work on this fulltime thanks to a really successful Patreon. This is super rare for a open source project but pretty much guarantees support for the project for the foreseeable future.
This blog post is a great and thorough introduction to Vue.js: http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/
Writing components in single files is mighty nice (w/ or w/o pre-processors): http://blog.evanyou.me/images/vue-component.png
And it looks like a flux approach is in the works: https://github.com/vuejs/vuex
This can be a useful alternative for small web apps similar to how AlpineJS is but please don't call it an alternative to Vue.
As a matter of fact Evan You (the creator of Vue) himself created a blog post about this topic (1)
(1) https://blog.evanyou.me/2013/11/04/simplify/
Author here - thanks for the submission, I was actually planning to do it tomorrow :)
Anyway, for those of you who are not familiar with Vue, here's a blog post explaining why it's worth taking a look at: http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/