Scope Out Frontend Framework

[realcadecon]

Before looking at the options, I made this list with a couple things in mind:

• Do we want this project to be a "learning" project?
• I personally like the idea of everyone being full-stack on this project, which means picking technologies everyone is ok working with or learning.
• How long do we want this project to take?

There are two routes here:

1. Stick with templating like Jinja or something else

• Pros:
  • Simple
  • Can still use bootstrap, custom CSS and HTML (custom CSS is still extremely powerful- This was made with only CSS)
  • Pretty sure you can even connect Tailwind CSS (might be hard)
• Cons:
  • Simple (Depending on how complex we want to make this app, a heavy duty front-end framework might be better)
  • Cool web designs with animations are much easier with JS - Everything on here uses JS libraries
  • I personally don't think there's much job value in templates

2. Scrap templating in favor of an agnostic API

There are tons a of frameworks that we can choose from all providing different pros and cons. This video does a pretty entertaining breakdown of some of the more popular options.

• Pros:
  • We get to use and/or learn JS.
  • There are tons and tons of JS libraries to use to make our website amazing. anime.js and three.js to name some.
  • The value of learning some of these frameworks and listing a project with more "relevant" tech on your resume is massive for new jobs down the line.
  • I think the process of connecting a frontend and backend framework would extremely informative
• Cons:
  • We have to use and/or learn JS.
  • These frameworks can be complex and would require a lot more time sunk into this project
  • Might be hard to agree on choosing these frameworks

[crissr11]

For starters, we might need to take a vote on what to decide between our two pathways, but I think 2 is the better option if we want to start it out small and begin adding more to it as we learn more frameworks and the complexities of connecting the frontend to the backend. I do like the idea of pair programming parts where we help each other out but we would need to get a schedule started to figure out how to implement.

I like pathway 2:

• Vue is super interesting because its closer in popularity besides Angular that isn't React and that seems more valuable for future job prospects.
• Is good for our use case because it is just a small team of us and we can fork this and branch into solo use cases to apply elsewhere for learning.
• If we ever want to branch out into different platform like mobile or desktop apps, the official documentation has resources but I know YouTube does too.