Investigate and Decide which technologies to use

[theWickedWebDev]

I know you wanted to use React, Node, Flux and talked about some other things. I think this would be a good place to keep our thoughts down, so I can also start reading more about what you are thinking.

[theWickedWebDev]

I would like to use LESS for a css pre-processor and was wondering your thoughts on Gulp for linting, minifying, etc...

[nerdgrass]

So, here's what I'm thinking:

• Gulp should probably be burned with fire. It was really cool, but having worked with it for a year or two now... its basically reinventing the wheel pretty damn hardcore. I'd vote to using a makefile & webpack for transpiling stuff.
• For CSS, why don't we give postcss a try? If you're unfamiliar, I'd kinda call it Babel for CSS. We can accomplish any of what you'd want to do w/ Sass, LESS, or Stylus, and have it work pretty well w/ webpack and ditch some of the overhead and language-specific tooling.
• I want to do react, but I'm pretty torn - it would be an order of magnitude simpler to just do static templates in Jade or EJS for the initial version. Removing the need for a client side app will speed up our MVP like nobody's business. We'll have to reload the page to sort crap, sure, and it definitely shouldn't last, but if we want a working version up as soon as possible, I'd lean towards static templates. This is the less fun, boring option, but it will get the project done quicker and force us to reign in user-facing features to a minimum.

Other ideas:

• Meteor. We need to have a full stack app, we could always try a full-stack framework. This might be a lot easier than rolling our own stack, and meteor has a lot of tooling around it and an active community. Pretty sure they're working up to react compatibility as well - need to look into this option more.
• Clojure & ClojureScript - I've been digging into Clojure and CLJS for the last few months and while I'm still very, very, very much a newb, it seems pretty incredible. This would be the hardest to do, but the biggest feather in our collective caps.

[nerdgrass]

So I was digging today for a bit more info on Meteor - Its been a while since I took a look at it and they've always been doing cool things. Turns out, Meteor is pretty interesting these days. Its prettymuch a universal javascript app framework that can do almost any client of our choosing. Right now, meteor supports & integrates with these clients:

• angular
• react
• blaze (their own thing, I think)
• iOS (unsure if webview or native app)
• Android (unsure if webview or native app)

It also has:

• full support for working w/ es2015
• wrapper for node parsing of CSVs
• decent deployment support from DigitalOcean and Heroku, and this js-specific platform w/ some weird integrated mongo stuff, Modulus

I haven't really ever put significant effort into meteor, but it seems worth investigating for this project. Do you have any experience with it?

[theWickedWebDev]

PostCSS - great Idea - I love it. I have no experience with it, but it seems baller and something I should learn

[theWickedWebDev]

I hear you on using Jade or EJS at first, and maybe thats the best. Perhaps when we make an actual app we can then have two versions of the project to give to the community. I also want to note that I really want to learn React, I know it will help me to know it and I think this project is a perfect fit for it. Other than that, I am on board with anything else you decide. Whatever you think will help you grow as a developer.

[nerdgrass]

I think I'd like to take a stab w/ meteor - it should (in theory) be a much more turnkey situation, and I think its worth a try (especially as we can use react with it). If not, we can just go back to express.

I'm very much down with react, the only way I can see not using it is if we end up doing express and needing to do jade or EJS for a short period of time before we make a real client using react. I'd also like to look into using react-native for mobile clients in the future - the learn once, write anywhere idea of react's mobile platforms is pretty damn awesome.