I promise writing applications for the browsers is not challenging. You don’t need big frameworks or component madness that’s more of the same.
You don't, but in any sufficiently complex app you'll end up writing a sort of 'mini framework' of your own as you abstract all the things that crop up more than a few times. That framework might be really nice at the start but it'll get more and more hacky as the project continues, especially if you're constrained by resources. Eventually you'll regret not using something standard.
If there are more than a couple of developers on the project it'll be something no one really likes after a year or two.
If there are more junior developers it'll be a reason for them to want to get off the team because they won't want to be a part of the 'old legacy code'. Then it'll be hard to find people who want to join.
Eventually, as it gets harder to recruit people to the team because it's on a weird, legacy framework that no one knows, there'll be a big project to refactor it on to something more standard. That'll probably be React. At the same time most of the senior developers will be calling to scrap the codebase entirely and rebuild it (wrongly in almost every case, but they don't care and want a greenfield project to play with new things on.)
This is a story that has played out at every large org that builds apps internally, and probably a lot of startups as they mature and need to hire more devs. You might as well skip all of it and use a standard framework from the start.
Anyways this idea of internal frameworks has always been weird to me. Nobody says this of code outside the browser, so why would they say this inside the browser? When I think about in those terms this clearly becomes a simple organizational problem and I don’t need a framework telling me how to organize things like a parent telling me to do chores.
https://github.com/prettydiff/webserver
When you aren’t using framework like components state restoration is a single function that runs only on page load. There is no state explosion and on localhost the SPA fully renders and finishes state restoration in about 105ms from http request.
For me that comfort is achieved through reuse and audits around data structure types through use of TypeScript. Now that ThpeScript is natively supported in Node it’s even faster still because there is no need for a build or compile step. The code just runs as is. This is also even true for code that executes only in the browser so long as it’s imported into a node module, which I do anyway to reduce the number of file requests into the browser.
If you want reactivity in web components, you need a wrapper or another framework/small library.
Yeah it is. I don’t like React but I’ve been doing this since the days of MooTools all the way through Backbone to the libraries we have today. Once your app reaches a certain size and/or reaches a critical mass of contributors it does get challenging and modern frameworks reduce that challenge.
That can be taken way too far. Almost every time I’ve worked with Redux I’ve found it infuriatingly unnecessary. And React is far from the best framework out there. But it is a huge benefit all the same.
With regard to application size we fortunately now have TypeScript. All you really need to scale any application is types, functions, and code reuse.
It just takes the minimal amount of discipline, and some conventions. I know it can be done because I did it, lots of people did it just a few years ago (some of those apps are STILL running today.)
