JavaScript frameworks have been the thing for 2017. And Angular, React and VueJS have been the leading frameworks that people are using.
So, with the WordPress REST API finally rolled into core in December 2016, I decided it was high time that I buckle down and learn one of the frameworks to stay up with the times.
And what I learned is that VueJS is going to be my preferred framework for the foreseeable future. While it doesn’t have quite the community that Angular or React have at the moment, it’s the best and quickest one to learn, and that makes a world of difference.
It's a relatively simple framework
So obviously this is a relative term. If you don’t know JavaScript already, trying to learn JavaScript frameworks is going to through you for also sorts of loops. Heck, it took reading Expert JavaScript by Mark E. Daggett for me to feel comfortable to even start learning a JavaScript framework.
But once you get past that, VueJS is the most simple of all of the major frameworks out there. It doesn’t require a whole bunch of plugins to work, nor do you need a complex file structure to get it running.
After figuring out VueJS, I went on to try and learn React, and that didn’t go so well. I quickly became overwhelmed by stores and actions and the need for so many different components and files. It just felt so unnecessary.
With VueJS, there’s none of that, or at least none that I’ve found. Sure, there are technically stores and components, but they don’t feel like a requirement to get going. And that makes it much easier to learn.
But it's also still very powerful
That being said, it’s not like VueJS does nothing at all. It still is a very well-written framework that can certainly do more than just get the job done.
I tried to re-do my personal website using VueJS and I got really close to completing it before just resorting to plain old PHP. But it wasn’t because of any problem with VueJS. Instead, the problem lied with the functionality in some of the plugins I use on the site.
There are a ton of VueJS plugins out there that lazy load images for you, show social media posts and even make it easier to integrate CSS frameworks like boot. And they’re all super easy to install and run.
So while it might not be quite as powerful as Angular or React, it’s more than powerful for any project you might be building.
VueJS is easy to learn
Still, the thing that makes me love VueJS is that it’s really easy to learn, especially compared to React and Angular. Once
For example, when I started working on a starter theme using React, I found myself very confused about what I needed to do to get it up and running. I looked at other WordPress starter themes with React on GitHub and I quickly got lost in the code.
Meanwhile, with VueJs, it took only a couple of days to understand what was going on and what I needed to do in order to load posts, load comments and do other WordPress functions as well. It all just feels super intuitive, which makes is so easy to learn. And if you’re just getting your feet wet in the JavaScript framework realm, that’s the most important factor.
Of course, VueJS might not quite be for everyone. Maybe you’re just really focused on learning Angular and React. And that’s fine. Those are perfectly good frameworks to learn.
But VueJS worked for me, and I highly recommend it to anyone who’s looking to start out on JavaScript frameworks. It’ll have you feeling like an accomplished developer in no time.