[GTALUG] Which JavaScript should I learn?

[Clifford Ilkay]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 2:16 AM, William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> Hi all, (If you're on KWLUG list, sorry for duplicate.)
>
> I have a general question about JavaScript.  I want to develop/propose
> "web app" hosted from embedded Linux board.  So,
>     - you go to its webpage,
>     - click "web app",
>     - it will serve out JavaScript to browser client, and
>     - the app will be running on the browser.
>
> Which Javascript should I learn?
>
> I mean, there are Meteor, Angular, React, Ember, Vue, etc.  Some are
> described as "framework", and others described as "library".  Then,
> there is Web Assembly I've been reading about recently.  It's difficult
> to figure out what's what.


If you don't know JavaScript already, don't start by attempting to learn
one of the frameworks or libraries. Learn plain JavaScript first. Unless
you intend to use Rust, C, or C++ to write your code, you can ignore
WebAssembly for now.

Meteor - I've ignored it because at the time I was looking, they used their
own packaging mechanism instead of Node packages and the only database they
supported was MongoDB. MongoDB is not likely a good fit for an embedded
Linux board.

Angular - which one? AngularJS, which is pre version 2x of Angular, is a
completely different beast than Angular 2x and on. We use AngularJS on a
project and it works well for us but the decision to use it was made in
2013/2014. I would not make the same decision today. AngularJS and Angular
are popular in the "enterprise" space.

Ember - if you like the rigid way it does things, it might be OK. I didn't
like it and it seemed like it didn't really solve problems I couldn't solve
with much more popular frameworks in better languages, like Django.

Vue - it's popular with the Laravel PHP crowd. It reminds me of Angular in
some ways. Meh...

React - I'd pick this for the front end today if I wanted to stick with
JavaScript because it's tremendously popular and there are a wealth of
resources available. That you can write once and deploy to the web,
natively to iOS and Android using ReactXP <
https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/> is a big win. The React license was
problematic but Facebook saw the error of its ways and changed the license
to an MIT license.

You'll still need some sort of server, which doesn't necessarily have to be
written in JavaScript. If you want to use the same language both on the
frontend and backend, I really like Feathers <https://feathersjs.com/> with
React.

Of course what you want to accomplish can be done with languages that
transpile to JavaScript, too. See: <
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js
>

I've mentioned Dart and Flutter before. I've been playing with it and like
it.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+1 647-778-8696
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20180313/dc2badfd/attachment.html>