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My position exactly: backend developer who only wants to do the minimum on the frontend. But for the next stage of the system (rich media streaming), it will r

My position exactly: backend developer who only wants to do the minimum on the frontend. But for the next stage of the system (rich media streaming), it will require a whole lot more interactivity on the front end and the time has come to decide on something! I'm leaning towards Vue because it seems easier to grok as a solo developer while still having plenty of power and support... but I'm indecisive!

adjkant 9y ago
The cases for each personally: Vue - It's been described as "Angular 1 without the flaws" before to me. I think it'd probably be the easiest transition. It also seems to have the advantage of being able to be sprinkled in lightly or heavily, dealers choice. React - As someone who loves functional programming, Redux immediately clicked for me, and I do enjoy that idea of state. However, it seems like a lot more work to learn it coming from Angular 1 for someone who is doing the minimum front-end and when it comes to any serious project will be working with a true front end developer. I'm just hearing of Moon obviously but I'll be keeping an eye out for the name when I am forced to switch from Angular 1.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  As somebody who does a mix of front end and back end fairly regularly, I think you're pretty on the nose here. If I can extend a little further, React is favoured (outside of the potential as a state machine) as the front-runner in isomorphic front-end apps. Of course there are also some lighter-weight similar frameworks like InfernoJS, and Preact, but React is certainly the one with the largest community and more robust support. If you're looking for mainly UI event handling, 2 way binding, etc, Vue is extremely capable and will probably keep your fingers (and maybe mind) a little cleaner. It can take a lot of the load and repetitive work out of developing that end. If you're looking to build out a UI with a large number of repeating elements, again state-handling, then I have to say I love working with React. It even caused me to change my way of thinking toward building out framework-less front end applications. Another plus with React is the large number of pre-built UI design frameworks and components that you can simply drop in everywhere and modify to the extent you really need to, if at all. As for media streaming, HLS.js (https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js) is a dream tool! There are some tricky bits to figure out that aren't documented overly well (like where the ID3 data is hiding amongst a single Uint8 array that has to be encoded and spliced), but the demuxer works like a dream without a heavy load increase and the event system is easy enough to work through. That is if you're building out your own custom player. I work at a media company and had to build out a custom player to diagnose some issues with stream metadata coming from a number of radio stations through a series of nodes (with no streaming media experience at that level previously) and I was able to get it up and running inside of a day or two.
  - photojosh 9y ago
    Thanks for the comments: very helpful! As I said in another comment, Vue looks increasingly the best choice given the use case and my experience. It's actually going to be everything except streaming video; going to send through audio, image links, and some extra data, and mush it all together at the client. Fortunately I don't have to worry much about adaptive bandwidth, since for the target audience we can just kick them off if they don't have enough bandwidth... if they can't get the 24 kbps for the Opus stream, then too bad! I'll have a good look at HLS.js. But I'm prototyping out using WebRTC to do it rather than HLS, given that iOS 11 will support it natively. Unless people have a strong argument against doing that way...
- photojosh 9y ago
  "when it comes to any serious project will be working with a true front end developer." So... not for me then! Ha! :) I've had a few more discussions with a webdev friend and it looks like Vue is the way to go. Thanks all.
CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
Best advice is probably to prepare for a lot of front end. Doing "the minimum" takes considerable skill and experience. Angular 1 or 2 makes some things simple by providing a proper "framework" in the place-logic-here sense. OTOH it can also be constraining because anything not matching that framework will be almost impossible to force in. And when things gets a little more advanced than the todo-app you suddenly have to learn lots of complex parts of the framework at once. React falls on the other end. Things stay relatively simple from todo and up, so easy to grow with. But there is no framework and no real consensus, so you need to evaluate a lot of debates and variations on how to approach things to move forward, this can require a lot more experience.

adjkant 9y ago

The cases for each personally: Vue - It's been described as "Angular 1 without the flaws" before to me. I think it'd probably be the easiest transition. It also seems to have the advantage of being able to be sprinkled in lightly or heavily, dealers choice. React - As someone who loves functional programming, Redux immediately clicked for me, and I do enjoy that idea of state. However, it seems like a lot more work to learn it coming from Angular 1 for someone who is doing the minimum front-end and when it comes to any serious project will be working with a true front end developer. I'm just hearing of Moon obviously but I'll be keeping an eye out for the name when I am forced to switch from Angular 1.

52-6F-62 9y ago
As somebody who does a mix of front end and back end fairly regularly, I think you're pretty on the nose here. If I can extend a little further, React is favoured (outside of the potential as a state machine) as the front-runner in isomorphic front-end apps. Of course there are also some lighter-weight similar frameworks like InfernoJS, and Preact, but React is certainly the one with the largest community and more robust support. If you're looking for mainly UI event handling, 2 way binding, etc, Vue is extremely capable and will probably keep your fingers (and maybe mind) a little cleaner. It can take a lot of the load and repetitive work out of developing that end. If you're looking to build out a UI with a large number of repeating elements, again state-handling, then I have to say I love working with React. It even caused me to change my way of thinking toward building out framework-less front end applications. Another plus with React is the large number of pre-built UI design frameworks and components that you can simply drop in everywhere and modify to the extent you really need to, if at all. As for media streaming, HLS.js (https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js) is a dream tool! There are some tricky bits to figure out that aren't documented overly well (like where the ID3 data is hiding amongst a single Uint8 array that has to be encoded and spliced), but the demuxer works like a dream without a heavy load increase and the event system is easy enough to work through. That is if you're building out your own custom player. I work at a media company and had to build out a custom player to diagnose some issues with stream metadata coming from a number of radio stations through a series of nodes (with no streaming media experience at that level previously) and I was able to get it up and running inside of a day or two.
- photojosh 9y ago
  Thanks for the comments: very helpful! As I said in another comment, Vue looks increasingly the best choice given the use case and my experience. It's actually going to be everything except streaming video; going to send through audio, image links, and some extra data, and mush it all together at the client. Fortunately I don't have to worry much about adaptive bandwidth, since for the target audience we can just kick them off if they don't have enough bandwidth... if they can't get the 24 kbps for the Opus stream, then too bad! I'll have a good look at HLS.js. But I'm prototyping out using WebRTC to do it rather than HLS, given that iOS 11 will support it natively. Unless people have a strong argument against doing that way...
photojosh 9y ago
"when it comes to any serious project will be working with a true front end developer." So... not for me then! Ha! :) I've had a few more discussions with a webdev friend and it looks like Vue is the way to go. Thanks all.

CuriousSkeptic 9y ago

Best advice is probably to prepare for a lot of front end. Doing "the minimum" takes considerable skill and experience. Angular 1 or 2 makes some things simple by providing a proper "framework" in the place-logic-here sense. OTOH it can also be constraining because anything not matching that framework will be almost impossible to force in. And when things gets a little more advanced than the todo-app you suddenly have to learn lots of complex parts of the framework at once. React falls on the other end. Things stay relatively simple from todo and up, so easy to grow with. But there is no framework and no real consensus, so you need to evaluate a lot of debates and variations on how to approach things to move forward, this can require a lot more experience.