I've mostly avoided adopting front-end app frameworks in POP Forums, which is good because there's no way I could have kept up with all of the false starts and changes. There was Knockout, then Angular, then Angular again, then React, then Vue... and none of it made sense for a text-heavy app like this anyway. But the style framework, and even the basic front-end scripts I have I do want to keep current, and that means ditching jQuery, as not even Bootstrap (the CSS base I'm using) needs it. I was hesitant to even put the work item in my backlog, because it felt like a lot of work.
Tonight I mostly got there, with the exception of the wire-up for post previews (because it needs the new Bootstrap). Javascript basically can do all the things now that jQuery did. I'm not even sure if I need the polyfills anymore, because I don't care about supporting aging technology, and my stats show almost no one is using it. It's a bit more verbose in syntax, but I'm happy to have one less dependency.
I do actually use Vue in the admin, and I'm a version behind there, but it looks straight forward to update. I use it in a very minimal way, and out of one file. In fact, I've mostly avoided all of the messy front-end building and npm dependency messes. The forum script is only 5k compressed. I've never even bothered to rewrite stuff into TypeScript, because I wouldn't really win anything for doing so.
I find this sort of work tedious, but since I'm not doing it for salary, it's not too bad. All things considered this, refactoring has been going fast enough.
No comments yet.