I’m an experienced backend developer. To me, the backend world seems super simple compared to the frontend world.
It seems like there are a million options and I don’t have the experience to say what’s good and what’s not. I’m hit with major choice paralysis, basically.
I don’t have any special requirements - I “just” want to build a pretty standard, responsive, modern-looking UI. Ideally without too much boilerplate, in a framework that “feels good”, in a way that might at some point attract other contributors as well, if I get to the point of open sourcing.
Of course I could just reach for the most popular thing i.e. React, but that doesn’t seem to be the “hip” thing to use nowadays (or maybe I’m wrong? What do I know, I’m a backend dev).
But even if I choose a framework, there’s a million other libraries out there to choose as well. For instance, which UI library to choose? What about observability and state management and authentication and so on?
Sorry if this is a bit ranty. I am honestly just looking for an experienced frontend developer to point me in some direction (i.e. some set of frameworks/libraries; a “stack” if you will), so I can get out of this choice paralysis.
What would be your go-to stack for a new frontend project today?
Maybe you are looking for a component library, something like Bulma or Bootstrap, rather than a JS framework. Your primary problem may be design, UX layout and learning basic CSS/HTML.
But if you want one of the lighter frameworks, I’d try Vue. But it is increasingly possible to do stuff without a framework, especially if your needs are not too complex. I’d start by looking into Vite, and use one of its simpler templates. You may want to select typescript instead of JS if you get the option.
Also… when you say “Frontend” we don’t know if you’re going to do a visualization-rich 3D application with touch gestures, or a business CRUD applications with lots of forms and tables and paginated lists filtered server-side, or a content-heavy web page with lots of articles to read…?
Yea definitely. But even here there are many choices. I’ve tried Bulma before and it’s “okay” but I feel it still takes a whole lot of tweaking with lots of small classes to get something that looks decent.
As I said above, I have no special requirements. Think about any “usual” website you visit, even something like Lemmy or Piefed, or other social media, or Wikipedia or YouTube or whatever. I don’t need anything particularly fancy. Probably closest to the “content-heavy web page” thing you mentioned?
If you want to try another, maybe Material. (The design guidelines or the components. But IMO the component docu has gotten worse.) But if you are going to overwrite the styles anyway, it may be easier to write your own CSS instead of debugging someone else’s.
So learn the HTML/CSS basics that you are missing, mostly on MDN. (CSS: selectors, pseudo-classes, flexbox, grid, css variables, units like rem/px/vh, media queries, collapsing of the margin, css reset and box-sizing, overflow, display, positioning, …; HTML/Web APIs: CSP, self-closing tags, fetch() API, querySelect(), URL.parse(), sessionStorage, form submit, form validation, blob, event bubbling, your browser’s inspect tools, …).
Even if you use a framework you will generally have to learn all this stuff anyway.