We hope that you had the light switch moment while reading this book. Web programming is complex but it does not need to be complicated or convoluted. The pursuit of developer happiness and maintainability productivity is endless. But the pursuit can be painless too.
Vue on Rails is not a swiss army knife for all solution. It is a start to an endless pursue to apply a simple approach to web development. This is accomplished through standing firm on two open source giants Rails and Vue.
The race has only just begun. The work of web programmers is endless as the web standard continues to evolve. Vue on Rails represents a movement that promotes cross pollination of developer-friendly frameworks that can only happen because we are standing on the shoulder of open source web giants.
We realize that technologies change at a fast pace and a solution that works today may not be ideal in the future. Even though we believe a Vue on Rails approach is a great combination, a lot of the concepts we discuss hope to open developers’ eyes to similar approaches with different technologies such as other MVC frameworks like Django, Java Spring, or .NET Core. I think the best advice is to constantly question an approach taken to solve a problem. If you keep doing things the same way, it might get the job done, but then you will never learn a potentially better way that will make your life easier.
Vue is Not Without Guilt
In the past year, Vue 2 has performed very well, in terms of adoption, and comes very close to a corporate-funded React JavaScript framework. In this regard, we feel that Vue has won the race by using an MIT License and is supported by the community rather than influenced largely by a single corporation.
But Vue 2 is not without guilt. For instance, compared to Rails’ latest JavaScript approach, Stimulus, Vue 2 is slow and more opinionated in how a developer should approach the frontend. Learning from history, any framework that deviates from the web standard will also not stand the test of a thousand developers’ pokes.
Stimulus is also closer to Vanilla JavaScript than Vue itself. Version 1.1 of Stimulus ships with a tiny minified build size of 30kb and carry no extra batteries like state management. Stimulus is twice as fast in rendering speed than Vue and loads less overhead than Vue.js.
With the early review of Vue 3, we see that the performance is fixed and comes with additional benefits like a more modular Vue.js. This means that you can enjoy a smaller Vue.js if you do not use certain aspect of Vue. For instance, if you do not use the transition classes of Vue.js, you can exclude it when you download Vue 3. Vue 3 is faster, smaller, and better in many ways.
Vue 3
Read more about Evan You’s plan for Version 3 of Vue.js at https://tinyurl.com/VuePoint and his presentation on Vue 3: https://tinyurl.com/Vue3Pres .
Ruby on Rails Isn’t the Top in Class Either
Ruby on Rails may suffer from performance inadequacy when compared to other web frameworks due to its Ruby language. Ruby language isn’t the fastest in the league and that’s fine. This is also why the 3 x 3 effort to speed up Ruby the programming language by the Ruby core team is a godsend.
Another famous effort is the ruby-like language Crystal that may have an impact on Rails in the future. Imagine switching out Ruby and having a plugin to reconcile any difference in syntax to enjoy the high-speed railway of concurrency.
Rails and its favorite programming language Ruby 3
Read more on how Ruby has been fast enough at https://tinyurl.com/RubyFast and Ruby 3x3 at https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/ .
Where Do You Go from Here?
If you find yourself performing a lot of repetitive tasks, take some time to automate those tasks using the best tools available.
Choose simplicity over complexity and convention over configuration.
Focus on building a great product for your customers.
Read Vue news https://news.vuejs.org/
Read Ruby on Rails news https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/news/
Become a watcher on the vueonrails gem to keep up to date on improvements https://github.com/vueonrails/vueonrails
Follow @ytbryan and @rlafranchi on GitHub