Vue.js: My First Impressions

Welcome back, in my seemly crazy goal of trying every popular JS framework under the sun this week we are going to discuss Vue.js. I was recently put on a new project and I had freedom in what technology I wanted to use for the front-end. The application was small enough so I didn’t want to go with Angular 2 and I have my problems with React. After chatting with a few colleagues I decided to give VueJS 2.0 a try.

Vue.js Documentation

A big part of learning a new technology is the quality of their documentation. Vue 2.0 documentation is good but I think it can be improved. One of the best parts of the React and Angular documentation is it’s very project based whereas the Vue documentation does have a project but it is a bit all over the place. There are a lot of good tutorials out there for Learning VueJS I would recommend going through them instead of the official documentation tutorial. If you need to quickly look up certain aspects of the Vue the documentation is a good resource.

What I Liked and Disliked

I will keep it short and sweet:

Liked:

• Vue-cli is an awesome resource to get started quickly
• Easy to learn
• It is just javascript unlike something like Angular 2/4 which involves Typescript etc…
• Component-based like other modern view frameworks.
• Has an official Router

Disliked

• The state is a bit of a pain, you can use Vuex (It is like Redux when using React), or you could simply create your own datastore.
• Vue instance can be very confusing. You have multiple instances for the same application and takes time to get your head around (at least I did)

Tutorial Links

Here are some of the links/tutorials I used to learn Vue.js:

• Vue 2: Step By Step - This was by far my favorite, there are 32 videos that goes into every part of Vue.js
• Vue.js 2.0 in 60 minutes - Done by Travery Media, good to get started but I advice using Step by Step series to go deeper
• Build a Vue.js Translator App using an API - Project based learning by Travery Media, you can see what is involved in building a real project

Finally thoughts

I really like Vue.js, I think I prefer working with Angular as I think it’s a lot easier to break up the structure of a project and provides a lot of extra features. However Angular is a framework, Vue is just a library and if you want to improve your javascript skills Vue js is a lot easier than learning React in my opinion. I would describe Vue as a mix of both Angular and React so if you have worked with any of these libraries you will pick up Vue easily. If you have worked with Vue let me know your thoughts and if have any suggestions on extra learning material please let me know.

Until next time,

Jason