Alright, buckle up folks! Let me tell you about my little adventure with “lew love”. It’s not as scandalous as it sounds, I promise! It’s just what I’ve been calling my side project exploring some, uh, let’s say, alternative front-end frameworks. You know, the kind that make React developers sweat.
So, it all started last month. I was bored, staring at the same React code day in and day out. My brain felt like scrambled eggs. I needed something to shake things up, something… different. I’d been hearing whispers about Svelte, Vue, even SolidJS, and I thought, “Why not dive in headfirst?”
First, I spun up a simple “Hello, World!” in each framework. Basic stuff, right? But even that was eye-opening. With Svelte, I was immediately struck by how little code I had to write. Seriously, it felt like cheating. Then Vue… Vue felt so familiar, so… approachable. Like an old friend that just got a new haircut. And SolidJS? That was the weird kid in the corner, doing things very differently, but somehow making it work. It felt closer to React but without all the extra baggage. I had to use Vite with every framework to get it running smoothly.
Next, I decided to build something slightly more complex: a basic to-do list app. I know, I know, original, right? But it’s a great way to get a feel for how a framework handles state management and component updates. This is where things got interesting.
With Svelte, the reactivity model was a breath of fresh air. Just assign a new value to a variable, and the UI updates. No `useState`, no `useEffect`, just… magic. I was blown away. I had to Google a couple of things with svelte because it wasn’t as obvious as React, I even got a few stack overflow error messages to fix.
Vue was also pretty smooth. The composition API felt a bit like React hooks, but cleaner somehow. I used the Vue CLI to get scaffolding and building done. Found the build process to be much simpler than other solutions. Plus, the Vue Devtools are amazing. Seriously, if you’re a front-end developer and you’re not using them, you’re missing out.
SolidJS… well, SolidJS was a challenge. It took me a while to wrap my head around its reactive primitives. Signals, memos, effects… it was a lot to take in. I spent a lot more time with the SolidJS documentation, and watched a few YouTube tutorials to understand how it worked. But once I got it, I started to appreciate its performance benefits. The whole thing compiles down to incredibly efficient JavaScript code.
I also tried to deploy each of the frameworks’ build package to Netlify to see which was the easiest. Svelte had the least configuration needed to deploy since it could deploy directly.
Now, am I ready to ditch React completely? Probably not. It’s still a powerful and versatile framework with a huge ecosystem. But this little “lew love” experiment has definitely opened my eyes to other possibilities. It reminded me that there’s more than one way to build a user interface, and that sometimes, exploring different approaches can make you a better developer overall.
So, my advice? Don’t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone and try something new. You might just discover your next favorite framework… or at least learn a few new tricks along the way.
That was my adventure, hope it was fun. Cheers!
