Another Frame of Reference

25 Feb 2021

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Most large companies have their own UI framework. Bootstrap, React, Flutter… it seems that every fortune 500 tech company finds it necessary to reinvent the wheel. Is javascript too open ended? Is html not enough? If you asked the people who developed these frameworks why they did so, each group might give you an entirely different answer. I am a bit early in my career to know the answers to these questions, however, it is quite clear to me that developing for the web is a large task to handle. There are different browsers, different internet speeds, and now there is different privacy settings for depending on where you live.

Undertaking such a large task must be difficult at enterprise level. After a certain period a project will get too big to manage and using (or creating) a framework became a necessary step to make sense of their own code. That said, for newer developers, the choice of using a framework is not so clear. In my own small experience I have managed to write projects in: html/css, react, semantic ui, flutter, asp.net, angular, and I have used website builders like wix and wordpress.

That’s quite a few different technologies for such a short period of time. Not only that, but this list does not represent the lion’s share of frameworks. There are many many out there and each try and market themselves as the best. In my short experience I have found that it is actually not worth it to learn these frameworks.

Many of these things are way more complicated than they have any right to be (wordpress) and while they are powerful in their own right, most lower-end websites that I have run across do not make use of the capabilities that these frameworks provide.

Saying it’s not worth it to learn these technologies was a bit of a lie. Like the enterprise developers before you, there are many questions that can be considered when choosing the tech stack for your application. My point being, don’t sleep on html! It gets the job done. As your project grows, maybe then will the wheels of time turn once again and history might repeat itself.

Amends

It is quite unhelpful to just say, “don’t use frameworks” so instead I’ll go over some of the positives and negatives of each one that I have used.

• html/css
  • pros:
    • tried and true
    • simple and effective
    • full compatability
  • cons:
    • not flashy
    • not easy to incorporate many of the ‘money makers’ (ad analytics, etc..)
    • hard to design moving parts
• flutter
  • pros:
    • uses dart (object oriented)
    • not super hard to incorporate money makers and moving parts
    • cross compatability with iphone/android
  • cons:
    • web pages look more like phone apps than pages
    • lots to learn
• react (my knowledge of react is somewhat limited)
  • pros:
    • very powerful
  • cons:
    • hard to learn
• semantic ui
  • pros:
    • more like html+ than anything else
    • don’t need to learn much to get working in it
    • complements other basic webpage skillsets
  • cons:
    • it can be hard to get elements to work like they’re intended
    • does not exist on its own (not really a con)
• asp.net
  • pros:
    • written in C#
    • works well with other Microsoft products
    • cross-platform
  • cons:
    • very hard to learn
    • the most overkill of all the frameworks I worked with
• angular (2.0+)
  • pros:
    • while not object oriented, has an object oriented feel
    • similar to flutter (both are google products), but more web focused
  • cons:
    • lots of boilerplate
    • a lot to learn before interesting apps can be written
• ‘no code’ solutions
  • pros:
    • easy
    • fast
  • cons:
    • not much control
    • hard to scale

That was quite the list!