4 ms·

And Backbone

• robocat 5y ago
  I would class those as era #3. There was a huge variety of innovation, and some libraries/frameworks had relatively more success (angular, backbone) or less success (qooxdoo, sproutcore). I think industry usage broadly follows the four steps I gave. The amazing thing is that everything was there back in 2000, and OWA showed the way. AFAIK IE5 had all the features needed to deliver an SPA, albeit the techniques to reliably and performantly take advantage of IE took a long time to either discover or to percolate through the industry. I remember people discovering almost hidden IE features all through the 00’s, and then taking advantage of those features. I personally recall IE5.5 definitely had all the DOM features I needed for a component framework, since I remember angrily writing minor workarounds specifically for that version. The vast majority of web developers were glued to their particular choice of HTML backend, so industry adoption of front-end frameworks was hideously slow. React was when frontend JavaScript frameworks appeared to me to become really mainstream, rather than just early adopters (era #3 of my list). My own progression was script.aculo.us -> dojo -> personal custom framework. My custom framework had major advantages for me over dojo (better: performance, reliability, flexibility, improved UI, development speed). Each individual developer will have their own view of how the industry progressed, but this is how I perceived it as a generalisation.