Ask HN: What is the state of the art set of tools for front end Web developers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the state of the art set of tools for front end Web developers?

20 pointsapignotti6 comments

Libraries, Frameworks, Testing tools, Continuous Integration tools, Automation tools, Compilers, Debuggers, Profilers, Collaboration tools...

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Current stack at work for me is Clojurescript / Reagent / Boot.

In JS land, I'm in the React camp. React's model is the biggest step forward on the frontend since jQuery. I stick with React over faster/smaller alternatives (virtual-dom) because the community size network effects mean there's stuff I want to use that I didn't have to write (e.g. React Router). I'm not a fan of any Flux library I've run into (and I've checked a dozen) so I'll be porting my cljs setup whenever I have to switch back. I'm in the functional JS camp so Immutable.js, Ramda, and js-csp for libraries and I run mocha+chai for testing. Keep an eye out for Netflix's Falcor and Facebook's Relay, which are vaporware at the moment but most likely disruptive.

I favor Webpack over the js task runners. It's always mostly done what I wanted and extending it is fairly straightforward. I find the configuration setup somewhat arcane but I've done enough variations that I have a working version of what I want to do somewhere on my hard drive to copy/paste.

Compiler is babel. The dev tools in most browsers are comparable, I'm still mostly on the Chrome ones out of familiarity.

A compilation of things I consider state of the art in the world of Front End.

Libraries : There are infinite number of libraries so - its kind of hard to mention any single one. But VirtualDom[1] is a great one. Also jstruct[2] seems like a good one.

Frameworks : React, Angular 2, Ember - Perhaps even Mercury or other VirtualDom based frameworks.

Testing Tools : Jest. A few other property testing tools as well.

Continuous Integration : ??

Automation Tools : Protractor ?

Compilers : Hmmmm. Babel obviously. Also consider Spiderlang, Clojurescript and Typescript.

Debuggers : Remote Debugging Protocol. Note that this is not itself a debugger but an enabler.

Profilers : Chrome and Edge Profilers.

Collaboration Tools : Not sure what you mean by this.

[1] : https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom [2] : https://github.com/sebinsua/jstruct

I want to ask where ember.js stand at?

Still disappointing, would be my response to the original question.

Ember is IMO second best at everything, which is pretty good for a fully integrated stack. If you don't have a very good idea of what you want to use for all the pieces of your app, you're working with a group of less experienced frontend developers, or you're on a project that's going to be maintained for a number of years by someone else, Ember is probably the best choice. Their project stewardship has been commendable.

Meteor

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