Unplugged

I got to test a lot of UX frameworks. Plain Html, Swing, Applets, JSP Apache Struts, Spring MVC. Even a little XNA for gaming. Most recently I got myself deep into Angular before getting away from FE coding for a couple years. I think Angular is amazing and I was able to create a lot of different sites with it. It was time for me to get back to whatever is new out there. In the meantime, I was trying to write in some space, and tried a couple of paid platforms, like Wordpress and Wix, but they were ugly, slow, and did not represent the space I wanted. Plus, they are not free. A no brainer! I decided then that this blog was a great excuse project, easy enough to test and learn, and in doing so it would let me build a space with the tone that I wanted.

HTML

And so I first created it the old way. Just plain HTML. It is a simple blog, so you wouldn't need anything fancy. And lacking dynamic content is not biggie. You may only lack comments, but I don’t expect much of them. Test site.

Vue JS

After that, VUE Js. This is a promising, lightweight framework, and I did enjoy it a lot. I like the division of template, code and style in the same component file. I felt it was similar to Angular, but without controllers. Test site.

React JS

React is today the most popular framework, and of course I was intrigued by it a lot. I like it. Especially the division of components, and that all is handled in a code file helped by JSX, which is a way of letting html language to live in a javascript code. But I still found unnatural the way it uses state, and the not-so-cool way of implementing two-way-binding. Apart from that, scoped styles add a little noise to the elegance it could have had. Test site.

Next JS

Finally, I decided to use React, mainly because of server-side rendering (SSR). The most famous implementation by Vercel, NextJS, seems to be close to mainstream. SSR makes a lot of sense for blogs like this for speed and SEO. So that is the site you are seeing today. Prod site.

Under the hood, I created a Firestore Database to store the posts and comments. I think it is more robust than I needed and resulted in some difficult and unnecessary queries. Netlify at first for the production environment, moving to Vercel for the final version. Both are great and I recommend them a lot.

Still a lot to learn on these frameworks, but at least I have a great understanding of how they work and it was a fun experiment. I’m not in a position to say which one is best, I think the usual “it depends” is what it applies now. Neither can I say which one I like the most. Now I'm curious today about 2D frameworks like P5.js, which I'm trying a bit. I will try to do something shortly to see what cool things you can do with it.