Front End Library?

help
1

It’s 2022 and I am coming back to webdev after a break for a couple of years. Of course 2 years in JS land is like 5 generations, 3 world wars an an alien invasion.

What is the front end library I ‘should’ be using (looking to get a job eventually) and that works well with Meteor. React still or has the world moved on?

Cheers

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2

React is still hot. There are plenty of people here who like Vue and Svelte as well.

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3

Just pick one of the big three (React, Vue and Svelte) develop a really good knowledge of it and dapple in the others and you’d be good to go professionally.

4

React and Semantic is pretty nice

5

My team and I have worked with the big three that @harry97 mentions, along with Angular and further back even hacky implementations of jQuery. For the last 6 years we have been solidly in the Vue camp.

Lower learning curve yet it’s still just as massively capable as React or Svelte, so the dev experience is more fun right out of the gate.

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6

What I found to work best with NodeJS:

  1. React with as little reactivity as possible.
  2. Redux for front end data management. (If one day MeteorJS closes shop, this allows for easy switch to something else)
  3. Redux Persistent as off line data management as well as for managing large counts of objects in a mix of local and online storage (e.g. for chats to store large amounts of discussions and messages like Telegram)
  4. Programming “OOD” with XState. This is particularly necessary when working with multiple external resources (e.g. getting data from multiple REST): Concepts | XState Docs

Both WebApps and Cordova.

7

I’d recommend taking a look at SolidJS. It’s been getting a lot of buzz lately (e.g. JavaScript Open Source Awards just gave it “Breakthrough of the Year”), and it’s reactivity system feels very much like Meteor’s Tracker (indeed, they can be integrated directly). It’s by far my preferred front-end framework. I’ve built a Meteor package and related libraries to integrate Solid + Meteor easily, but still need to make a starter template; meanwhile you can look at this demo.

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8

Interesting! Looks like React but a bit cleaner maybe?
Will take a dive as soon as I get some free time.

9

I would say the top 5 front-end frameworks/libraries:

  1. React - popular everywhere
  2. Vue
  3. Angular
  4. Svelte
  5. SolidJS - looks like React without the noise
  6. Blaze - Meteor Frontend framework - really simple to use it
10

No one mention Blaze, so I will. we are using it in many apps, including old (6+ years in maintenance) and new apps. Blaze is up to date and well maintained. We are using it because its learning curve is 0. All involved devs need to know only HTML and basic JS. It works well for SPAs, and apps with dashboards and complex UIs

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11

Thanks for reminding us, Dimitry. Blaze is so slept on with some love it could be elevated to new heights!

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12

I’ll second Blaze. While we use Vue a ton on our apps, we still use Blaze in our main Meteor apps. I personally don’t find I need more than what Blaze can do, so it would be interesting for folks to chime in if they think Blaze’s feature set is insufficient.

Definitely Blaze has the lowest learning curve and when I began working with it + Meteor 6 years ago, I had been doing dev for a decade at that point and suddenly found myself having a ton of fun all over again.

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True, blaze is simple and powerful - I use it for all my email rendering because it’s just the easiest way to get it done and React is overkill really.

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