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Discussion on: You Probably Don't Need A Front End Framework

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bbarbour profile image
Brian Barbour

I kind of regret the title, as this was more to share something I learned or discovered making my app--rather than to tell people what they should/shouldn't do. It was more about my thoughts/experience. That's why you got the impression that the focus is all over the place.

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mattwelke profile image
Matt Welke

I think it wasn't that you discovered you may not need a framework. You discovered that you didn't need a client rendering framework. Express is actually considered a framework. It's meant to help you create web apps. And it's only a recent development in the industry that we started to send only JSON from the server and have the client parse it and render something new on the page.

I'm glad you discovered Express HTML templating. :) It's quite simpler than doing SPAs, as you've noticed. It's my go to for quick prototypes. I only do SPAs if I'm sure I'll need some rich client functionality. And even then, sometimes I can get by with just adding some JS to the rendered page that allows the user to have that page change with some AJAX calls before they move on to a different page. And for that, I can use jQuery, or just vanilla JS if I don't think I need jQuery.

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bbarbour profile image
Brian Barbour

If this project becomes anything more than an experiment, I can easily my Express endpoints ones that return JSON and then build a front end. I think that's my biggest take away. My oohhh I gotta share this moment.