Comment by systemvoltage
5 years ago
No, we don't have a design team, we're too small for that.
Just that our backend is already built using Django many many years ago. If I need to add some interactivity, I use jQuery currently. Looked into Vue and it allows us to keep everything as is in the backend and use it like jQuery.
I shudder everytime I need to install npm, webpack, gulp, etc..all the JS tools feel super flaky, unnecessary and does not inspire confidence in the tooling. That's my take anyways.
Lot of developers don't have the priviledge of starting a new project. It's an existing doctors appointment website or some shit people cobbled up in PHP in 2004 that is still running and we need to maintain it.
For context, I started doing web dev back in ES5 JS, jQuery, Angular.js (1), and server-side templated HTML views days.
I write in a lot of other languages as well, and I would hear people say this and not get it. I thought to myself:
"It's not THAT bad. I think the experience is fine."
Then I wrote an app recently on the JVM. Sweet jesus the JS/Node ecosystem is a nightmare + house of cards.
The JVM and CLR (.NET) have their stuff together. I need like ~10 dependency libraries to do a large project, and often times they are over a decade old.
The tooling is on another level.
I don't have PROBLEMS writing TS apps, and the experience is good. But some of them have a dependency tree that span thousands of packages, and I've come back 2-3 years later to try to run a project and had some downstream dep break, and then updating fails, and then...
I know it's somewhat of a meme, but this is unironically why I find Deno interesting. (Disclaimer: Haven't shipped anything with it)
Especially since with the most recent release, they have an option to emit Node-compatible JS bundles from Deno code.
I totally identify with your aversion to build tools, but things have changed for the better in the last few years.
My advice would be to check out Vite, and use it with Vue. I've introduced Vite/Vue2 to a pre-existing Django project and couldn't be happier. I've explored a number of different approaches for integrating Vite and Django, and this blog had the best approach, IMO: https://weautomate.org/articles/using-vite-js-with-django/