Up until about March this year, I was primarily an iOS developer and had been for a while. But, this year I decided that the things I want to build would be best built on the web, and so I started to learn modern web development. I was struck by the lack of consensus about what that means.
My goal is to build a real web app, not just to learn. I already know HTML/CSS/JS going into this. If your goal is to get started or just to learn, I’d start with HTML/CSS/JS and maybe React or Vue and not worry too much about the rest yet.
Right now, I’d say, if you want to be an iOS developer, you download Xcode, write in Swift, use UIKit for the UI and standard components and libraries and you can build professional apps. There’s built-in support for most things that you need, and the Apple implementations are excellent. All of the apps I have worked on are not much more than this.
On the web, I’d say the one consensus choice is to use VSCode, but then it starts bifurcating quickly after that.
The default language of the web is Javascript, but you can use anything that transpiles to it. I have decided on Typescript, but I think Clojurescript is a reasonable choice. There are probably a few others.
At this point, you basically have nothing. The browser provides an HTML renderer, very basic components, and a limited library. You are going to need to add dependencies to do anything beyond the basics (you had to do this even to get Typescript).
The first choice I had to make was what UI framework to use. I chose React, but people I trust also use Vue. There are few others that seem reasonable, but React seemed a good fit for me. By the way, if you want to get started with React, I recommend Pure React, which is a book explains React in isolation.
It might be overkill, but I decided to use Redux to manage state. React has something built in now, but I like things that have been around a while.
I also needed a design system — something with ready-made components. I didn’t find anything that great, but chose Material-UI in the end as it seemed the best supported.
I wanted to like Microsoft’s Fluid, but I couldn’t get it to look right for me. I also could not get Ant to work at all (I’m a newb at this). Every big company seems to promote one of these — my old employer, Atlassian, has ADG, which looks ok. SalesForce has one too. But, they all seem to have a different idea about what a reasonable amount of markup is for default usage. Material-UI is usually a simple tag with a few attributes to get something on the screen — these other systems are way more complex. There is also a vibrant commercial market for components. I will probably revisit this after my MVP is done.
I decided on GraphQL as my API basis, and so I got another easy choice: Apollo. I also added GraphQL codegen because it can turn GQL into a Typescript API (with typechecking).
It doesn’t stop there. I have eslint, prettier, and jest as my code quality tools. I think those are default choices, but there were others. In iOS, code formatting and unit testing are built in.
And this is all just to get something minimal working. I have also had to add in some other components for specific features.
I have also checked in with people in my network that do this for a living, and I haven’t found two that have made the same choices. Except for VSCode — that does seem universal.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the backend, but there is no comparison with iOS, since you’d have to decide on this as well for a server backed app.