alt Hacker NewsThe real question is, do we actually need "frameworks"? Pure JS works pretty well, and no JS at all even better.
I recently worked on an SAP project where there was a whole Java layer in front of SAP, and then a huge Angular app on top of it all; but since the point of the application was to manage b2b sales of physical things and it mattered very much whether those things were in stock, almost every screen did a full request to the SAP layer. The need for a thick "rich" client was unclear, and PHP would probably have worked much better.
Hype aside, it seems big organizations are using frameworks as a mean to ensure uniform coding practices and make developers more easily replaceable; but surely there are better ways to achieve that.
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I agree. In a recent small project, I ran an experiment: first, I built the app in React, then in Vue, and finally in vanilla JS. In the end, I stuck with the vanilla JS version because it was significantly smaller, easier to deploy, and much simpler to maintain long-term.
I worked at a startup where one of the original devs had “strong opinions” on JavaScript frameworks. “It’s all bloat!!! We don’t need that crap”. So consequently all the new engineers had to learn this dude’s codebase, which turned into to be… A framework! Only instead of a documented one that had plenty of support it was an unholy mess that required extra time to build all the stuff missing from the it’s-not-a-bloated-framework-but-pure-JavaScript-framework.
Guess what happened the day after the dude left the company? All the engineers immediately started to replace the unholy mess of “totally not a framework” framework with an actual one.
Guess what happened to development productivity and product quality? They went up dramatically.
As someone who's worked on web apps with and without frameworks, yes, we need frameworks, especially if it's a large one or if there's a team of more than a few people involved.
The good ones these days like Vue or especially Svelte are barely any different to how you'd do things the "vanilla" way except they provide some sane QoL features like components (anyone who says web components are the answer has very obviously never used web components) and sane data flow management to and from said components.
I mean, more power to you if you want to handle complex states without the features a lib like Vue or Svelte provide you, but in my experience you eventually end up with a homecooked framework anyways, even for apps that aren't that complex. And at that point you're just doing React or Angular or Vue, but worse in every conceivable way. Yay for going at it vanilla, I guess?
> The real question is, do we actually need "frameworks"?
Yes. The advantage of having a common API across thousands of web apps shouldn't be a point of discussion.
Not every page or app needs framework. But building complex app without one would be very hard and time consuming, and your team would need to come up with ways to solve problems like architecture, code structure, routing, data management, state management, etc. So you would basically reinvent all the wheels on your own cost, and you will have a non standard solution, that would not be compatible with libraries out there (for example UI components) and neither with new devs. Before Angular and React came I was building apps with plain JS with jQuery (not a framework, just a lib) and I would never go back there.