Since April last year, I’ve been plunging again in the world of Web development.. and what fun it has been! In this series of posts, I’m going to summarize the stuff I’ve done last year in order to hop back on the train and I’ll describe what I’ve learned along the way.

At the time, I published two blog posts, which were my way of condensing my vision for an important project at work aiming to modernize the way we create Web applications by going towards a client-side architecture combined with RESTful Web Services on the back-end.

When I started looking back at how the Web platform had evolved during the 2012-2015 period, the main things I had on my mind were:

• mobile first & responsive web design
• client side Web application architecture (which I personally consider to be the part of Web 3.0 — seriously, why not?)
• the new specs that had reached broad support in modern Web browsers and were gaining a lot of traction
• the offline first idea that these specs made more realistic

I wanted to learn more about AngularJS, node.js, npm and sass but that was about it. I remember that at first, I had no precise idea yet about the build tool and the build steps that I wanted/needed… I hadn’t even heard about ES6 yet!

Since then, I’ve learned a ton about ES2015, TypeScript, module systems, module loaders, JS frameworks & the tooling around, front-end state management solutions, front-end build systems, project boilerplates, css style guides, quality assurance for front-end apps, unit & e2e testing libraries, … and the integration of it all…

The funny thing is that… I failed to deliver.

Initially, my personal goal was to create a responsive client-side Web app exploiting the RESTful API of my WordPress installation to replace my current theme, but I changed my mind along the way… So far, my site hasn’t changed one bit. I did improve some things though, but that was more around security than anything else.

So what made me change my mind and where did I spend my time?

At first, I was concentrated on the task at hand and I looked at how the HTML5 boilerplate had evolved as I knew that it was one of the best starting points around for creating modern Web apps. My idea was simple: use HTML5 boilerplate or InitializR to get ModernizR… and add some good old script tags… :p

I started with HTML5 boilerplate, but shortly after, I stumbled upon Web Starter Kit which was fresh out of Google’s oven, was based on HTML5 boilerplate and had some really cool features.

It came out of the box with a nice build which included support for JSCS (JS code style), JSHint (JS code quality), autoprefixing, BrowserSync (if you don’t know that one, DO check it out!), sass and ES6 (that was still the name at that point) with the help of Babel, …

 I really liked their setup and decided to use it as basis for my project; and that’s where my trajectory deviated :)

Given that I’m quite curious, I spent a while deconstructing Web Starter Kit’s build so that I could really understand what made it tick. That made me discover npm, gulp and the whole ecosystem of gulp plugins.

I really enjoyed doing so as it has helped me better grasp the necessary build steps for modern Web apps:

• transpile code (ts->js, sass->css, …)
• check quality
• check style
• create a production build (bundle, minify, mangle, …)
• execute unit tests
• execute end to end tests
• …

At that moment, I was happy with the build as it stood so I continued to focus on developing my app. I took a good look at what ES6 was, what it meant for JavaScript, its ecosystem and how Babel helped (was it still called 6to5 then?). Learning about ES6 features took me a long while and I’m still far from done, but it was well worth it. ES2015 is such an huuuuuuuuuuuge step forward for the language.

I also took a glance at Angular 2 which was still in alpha state. It looked interesting but I believed that it would never be ready in time for our project at work (and it wasn’t). Still, I did spend a few days toying around with the alpha just to get to understand the basic principles.. and I must say that I really really loved what I saw!

That quick research spike also made me discover TypeScript.

Having a strong Java & OO background, TypeScript (TS) directly got me excited. I’m a strong believer in strong (heh) typing, and the fact that TS already supported many ES6 features that weren’t natively supported by Web browsers yet was very appealing to me.

Moreover, having dozens of Java developers in our development teams at work, TypeScript seemed really ideal for us as it supports many features and idioms that our developers are very familiar with (classes, interfaces, generics, strong typing, decorators, …).

If you want to learn more about TypeScript, I definitely recommend the Typescript Deep Dive.

At that point, tsconfig.json wasn’t there yet and the most evident choice to integrate the necessary build step was gulp, as advertised by Dan Walhin’s excellent blog post. If I had read more about npm I might have gone a completely different path (i.e., used npm scripts only).. ^^.

At that point, I had to deviate from what Web Starter Kit offered me in order to add build tasks for TypeScript, tslint, etc. Fiddling with the build made me realize that it was quite brittle, so I refactored it quite a lot and tried to improve things (e.g., separate the build tasks in different files, extract the configuration settings, ensure that it would not break the build on each error, etc). I remember that I wanted to contribute back to Web Starter Kit but realized too late that I had made too many changes at once for them to be able to integrate easily (silly me, bummer).

I went pretty far with actually as at some point, I was using TypeScript to output ES6 code that I then sent through Babel, just so that I could use async/await and other things that TypeScript wasn’t able to transpile to ES5… :)

The exercise helped me see how “immature” and “fragile” the whole JavaScript ecosystem was. What I mean by that is that there seems to be only moving parts and each of those parts don’t necessarily keep happy with each other. Not only do too few people really understand what semver actually means and respect it, but everything that shines bright gets replaced faster than the speed of light :)

As a technologist, I love the pace it imposes for the fun and innovation it brings to the table, but it’s also frustrating for many reasons and (should be) quite scary for enterprises (to some degree). People talk about JavaScript fatigue, which is quite a fun way to put it and I can certainly understand the idea now.

One example that I thought a lot about is the fact that each and every front-end project seems to have its own build chain and build configuration that lives within the project, in complete isolation and has to be maintained.

Of course each and every project has its specificities so there really can’t be ONE rigid & reusable solution to rule them all, but the idea of duplicating so much effort needlessly across a whole community of developers violates the DRY principle as much as anything ever could.

Just try and imagine how many people must have used some Yeoman generator to scaffold projects, which now all have separate builds with tasks that all do the same things but are all defined 20.000 times in a gazillion different ways using variable and unreliable dependency versions… :)

When you scaffold a project using a generator, you end up with a snapshot of the template and of the build provided by the generator at that point in time and then it’s up to you to keep your version up to date and to integrate all improvements and bug fixes, assuming you have time to follow that… you poor thing!

Being part of a core software development team at work, my focus is most often on finding reusable solutions to common problems, limiting effort duplication and what not and thus, the front-end universe’s situation seems quite sad in that regard.

Another point that struck me was how limited the main package management solution was. npm is nice and all, but not being able to define some parent/generic/reusable configuration (e.g., like parent pom files in Maven) is kind of surprising. Again, the DRY principle probably corresponds to DO Repeat Yourself in the frontend universe. I’m sure that front-end experts will tell me that you can work around all that in countless ways, but that’s exactly the issue: I shouldn’t have to invent my solution for a general issue people should be concerned about.

To conclude on a positive note though, I do believe that all the tooling DOES bring added value because it makes it possible to manage dependencies correctly, define build steps which execute tests, generate coverage reports (e.g., using Istanbul), generate production builds etc.

This piece is getting a bit long, so I’ll continue my little story in part two!