Frontend Frameworks 2024 with Mihail Marcu

The IT sector requires continuous learning and close attention to the emergence of new technologies. What was used 5 years ago is no longer relevant. And to keep up with the times, you need to learn new approaches. And if you are still thinking of entering IT and going to do it through the frontend, you need to choose the right door 😉 

Although I have been working in IT since 2007, I took the path of non-technical specialisation as programming failed to interest me. However, with the development team we have been working shoulder to shoulder for over 18 years, and I try to observe trends in this area.

I approached an experienced frontend developer Mihail Marcu. Mihail has been in IT since 2010, and his experience includes working as a UI/UX designer, which certainly helps him in his current job as an interface programmer.

During these 14 years Mihail managed to work in many companies, but the most interesting, in my opinion, is 5 years of experience in the international company bit.ly.

So, let's get to the frameworks.

What frameworks do you use in your work

All the time I've been working, I've used various frontend frameworks, from jQuery to Angular, Angular to React/Next, React/Next to Vue/Nuxt, and at the moment I'm mostly focused on VUE/NUXT.

From my own experience I can say that Vue changed the world of frontend a lot, it was one of the first frameworks that was not written by a corporation, and it showed a completely different approach to writing frontend, let alone SFC. It showed that frontend, and especially the process of DOM reactivity and rendering, didn't have to be complex.

What's trending right now

Frontend is evolving a lot, and in recent years there has been a tendency to return to technologies that were used long before SPA. We're talking about server-side rendering (SSR), where we pass HTML already rendered on the server to the client. That's why I've now switched to Nuxt. In my opinion, it is one of the most successful frameworks at the moment. Although there is a framework that I consider more advanced and innovative than Nuxt, but more on that later.

Nuxt has some bugs too, as it's relatively new and came out recently, but it has brought a lot of freshness to the frontend world:

• auto import of components
• server handlers
• server routes
• SSR status

Essentially Next.js gives us all of this, but I find Nuxt much easier for beginners as it's user friendly and it's easy to create even the smallest application that already works right away.

A lot of people say Next is easier than Nuxt. This is very individual. Depends on what kind of background the developer has, but SFC will always be easier to understand by many than JSX in my opinion.

Pure front-end or still fullstack?

In recent years, there has been a trend of developers becoming full stack developers. If you think back to the 2010s: we used HTML, CSS, JS (jQuery) to write the frontend, and PHP, .NET, Java for the backend. And everyone was doing their own thing. Now I think we're all kind of hybrid developers: Nuxt/Next, Node/Express/Nest, (something native like Ionic or React Native). You need to be able to work on SOLID, Postgres, Mongo principles, and that's roughly what's required now on the frontend, meaning we're slowly moving to fullstack.

Nuxt allows you to build fullstack applications using UniJS/H3, which I myself have written many REST APIs on and I can say that this is again a new approach to building server-side applications. Compared to Express JS and Nest JS, UniJS/H3 has shown that request handlers can be used like composable or similar to hooks in React, making it very easy to create simple basic APIs. So at the moment I consider Nuxt to be the best framework for frontend/full stack development. However, it can't be all that good, right? It can't all be perfect anyway.

By the way, there is a scary word for frontend developers - HYDRATION. This is the process where the server returns HTML and dozens of large JS files have to be loaded to make the application workable and interactive. This makes frontend development pretty heavy.

New frameworks to look out for 

Going back to what I was talking about earlier, there is a framework that has a great potential to surpass Nuxt/Next and the rest of the frameworks. We're talking about QWIK JS right now. It does everything the same as Nuxt, but it doesn't have a hydration process. It uses a new technology called "reusability", which allows us to load a minimum amount of JS for our application and, with the help of service workers and so-called "signals", load JavaScript chunks only when needed. 

This framework is still new, but I already consider it ready to be used in production, and I recommend all frontend developers to pay attention to it. It has a great potential to change the frontend and make everything more convenient and faster for both developers and end users.

Thank you Mihail for your detailed and detailed reply! I am sure it is very useful for our readers.