At SitePen, web application development is the core of what we do. We pride ourselves on our reputation for creating rich web apps that are highly responsive and reliable.

An article on 2nd Generation JavaScript Frameworks & Libraries: beyond Angular, React, and Vue! recaps Geertjan Wielenga’s talk on the evolution of JavaScript and the influence of the enterprise in recent years. Wielenga spoke of the pioneers of JavaScript frameworks and libraries including Dojo (1.x), Mootools, Extjs, jQuery, and YUI which were among the first libraries to address the needs of the developer.

So you’ve built an amazing app using Dojo and now you are ready to go live. After a bit of research, you learn that traditional deployments are challenging! Luckily, the days of FTPing files are long gone, and we can rely on Docker for fast, reliable deployments.

One common complaint around web applications is that they can feel slow or clunky compared with native applications. Sometimes we find sites that can take a long time to load (let’s say longer than 3 seconds) and sometimes those sites feel non-interactive or ‘janky’ when we try to interact with them.

Maintaining software is challenging. Stagnant software quickly becomes obsolete and this couldn’t be truer than in the JavaScript ecosystem.

SitePen participates in a number of conferences around the world presenting new technology and ideas to engineers and designers. Recently Dylan Schiemann and Tom Dye spoke at the HalfStack Conference in London and Paul Shannon spoke at Phoenix TypeScript meetup.

Every year, Esri, the world’s largest geospatial software vendor, runs its developer summit in Europe. This conference, the Esri EU DevSummit, attracts around 350 developers working with Esri technology from across Europe, all coalescing in Berlin.

All Things Open is a large, community-created open source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, with nearly 4,000 attendees and 20 concurrent sessions. At this year’s event, I was invited to deliver a talk similar to one I had presented at JSConf titled “React Already Did That.” The session itself is not actually about React, but about several key concepts in how the JavaScript ecosystem evolves.

At this month’s FullStack London 2018, our CEO, Dylan Schiemann, presented the talk “Choosing a Framework”, based on our Choosing a Framework blog series. Given our long history in web development, we’ve seen JavaScript evolve from an obscure simplistic scripting language to the language of the internet.

For many front-end developers, components have become a central concept in their development workflow. Components provide a robust model for architecting and scaling complex applications, allowing for composition from smaller and simpler encapsulated parts.

Resize Observer allows developers to receive notifications when the size of an element’s content rectangle changes. This helps manage a variety of application layout scenarios including responsive application layout, flexible layouts such as split panes, or dynamic changes in content within an element in a page.

At the recent TSConf, SitePen engineer Sarah Higley delivered a talk titled Escape the Office: Designing Interfaces for Other Developers. The moment you step into any large project or open source venture you must accept that code you write gets used in ways you did not originally intend.

It has come time to read the liner notes and write some conclusions. When we started writing this blog series, we knew that JavaScript/web application frameworks were not easy to summarize.

It is like the old proverb, “It takes a village to raise a web framework.” As we explored in the previous post, choosing a framework goes beyond the technical features of a framework and this is certainly true when it comes to the wider community, which includes considerations like licensing, how open the framework is, and where to turn for education and support. While each web framework we have been discussing is an open source framework, there is a wide spectrum of what that actually means and how it affects the use and future development of a framework.

For a web framework to be effective, it should offer you more than just functionality. It doesn’t matter how much hard work you put into your application if it breaks when people use it.

Over the past year we’ve been heads-down working hard on Dojo 2 and its component architecture. The ability to change default component behavior is essential to a widget library, and several tactics exist for doing so.

Recently I was fortunate to be able to attend the Google Polymer Summit in Copenhagen with a SitePen colleague. Having attended the PWA Summit last year in Amsterdam we were expecting a well organised and interesting conference, and we were not to be disappointed.

Test early, test often, and test some more. Why put our heart and soul into our web applications only to be let down because we are not completely testing them.

Let’s figure out how to play our album. Is it a 45 vinyl or some sort of fancy SACD? Gaining insight into how we might develop and deploy an application built on a web framework helps us figure out if it is the right fit for our team.

As new user interface component frameworks are created and old frameworks are replaced with emerging technologies, methods for styling those components must change with them. Long gone are the days of creating a simple HTML component and importing a simple CSS file with corresponding class names.

Previously on Web Frameworks, we looked at how various frameworks deal with the concept of applications. Akin to listening to the whole album, we got a sense of how the frameworks pull it all together.

Applications built with web technologies, something that was a curiosity a few short years ago, have emerged onto the scene as a must have for most organizations. Transcending websites and providing users with a more open and unbounded experience, web applications are everywhere.

As businesses expand into new markets and existing markets become more diverse, it is increasingly rare that enterprise applications can expect to serve speakers of only one language, with identical expectations for how they should be addressed or be presented data. In spite of this, globalization — the process of catering an experience to users in specific regions — receives less attention than is warranted, and many times is an afterthought in application development.

We have previously discussed the look and feel of web frameworks. While we often become interested in a framework based on the stylishness of the widgets and applications it can create, this may lead to a similar approach to how we have historically selected music.

While instruments such as guitar and drums are part of a band, how they are used by the musicians define the style of the band’s music. Similarly, the elements of an application user interface connected together define the user experience.

Whether it is Top 40 or classical or R&B, artists and music have a recognizable look and feel. When looking at frameworks, some simply provide us with a bag of instruments, while others provide us with chord progressions and album covers we can customize.

…we would all be using justin-bieber.js. We as an organization have been working with JavaScript since 2000.