My Front End Favourites

In this article, I’d like to talk about the parts of the front end ecosystem that I love, at this moment in time there’s an insane amount of tools & technologies, in my current role I’m utilising both React & Angular. But if I were to use one of the current frameworks out of choice, I’d probably go with React, purely because it’s just the view, React itself is just a library, nothing more.

Talking about state management, a lot of people go crazy over the Redux pattern, some love it, some hate it, personally I like it, when it’s used in the right scenario. I find that a lot of front end applications don’t actually need to make use of Redux, I personally believe that a lot of people should consider using alternative state management strategies. An alternative to making use of Redux could be something like hooks or possibly lifting state. Personally I like to lift state by using some concepts & principles that are used in Redux, it’s simple, lightweight & it just works.

Regarding tools, there’s again an insane range of front end tools around these days, but personally I like to make use of WebPack, partially because there’s a large amount of support, it can do just about anything & it’s enterprise ready, at least in my opinion. The beauty of using WebPack is that you can totally tailor your front end ecosystem & build process, i.e. you can use Pug, SASS & whatever else you like, like image compression. Not to say that you can’t do this with other front end tools, but with WebPack it’s incredibly easy, not to mention that if you use the Laravel ecosystem, you can make use of Laravel Mix.

Regarding the libraries, there’s a number of React tailored libraries that I enjoy, including the standard one’s such as React router, then having come from using JSF, I personally like using Prime React. One that I love is React-MD, personally I love the material design, it’s clean, elegant & modern, but furthermore, the library is somewhat popular, at this moment in time, it has ~9,000 weekly downloads on NPM.

I could go on & on about other aspects, such as deployment & testing technologies, but perhaps I’ll make a second article containing content related to these subjects.