In any IT-based companies, your roles are often well-defined. If you are a back end developer, then you would handle the back end stuff like database management, REST API design, storage and such. If you are a front end developer, then you would handle the front end stuff like user interface design mostly. If you identify yourself as either one of the above, then you would also know that you would have to work in a team, hence there is a back end team and a front end team of developers, each having their own separation of concerns. Here in AESTE, there is no back end team, nor there is a front end team. Here in AESTE, you get to have the best of both worlds, i.e you would do both front end AND back end development. You would be well on your way to becoming a full stack developer.
So far in my current project, I have been working on the back end part of the application. Although both ends of the application play a vital role, it is first and foremost important that the back end should be working as expected. Front end would never stay constant for a long period of time, it would undergo a series of changes in order to provide better user experiences. After all, the first thing the user sees is the front end interface, and it may give them a first impression of how good or bad the software is. The back end may last for several of these front end changes, until there is a decision to change or even redo the back end.
This is what had happened with this project. At first, Wt was used to develop the front end, then came Admin On Rest. And now, it would be done with Vue.js. Actually, Dr Shawn gave me the option of developing the front end with Wt again as well, since I’m already familiar with it. But then I decided that I want to do it in Vue.js, as I wanted to breakaway from C++ for awhile and also be more fluent in front end development. I honestly prefer back end development as that is what I’ve been familiar with and I often consider myself to be not a good visual designer. However, it is good to push yourself out of your comfort zone once in a while, no harm in learning.
In recent years, Vue.js has been reaching steam, vying to be one of the top JavaScript UI framework and it has already established itself to be one. Here is some cool list of projects that used Vue.js, to show how much popularity it has already gained. It is no surprise why a lot of web developers are so infatuated with it. One really good feature of Vue.js is its Components. A component is basically a reusable piece of code whereby it has its own internal data members and methods, similar to what classes would have in Object-oriented programming. A template i.e some bunch of HTML elements that make up this component, is provided in order to render it in the DOM tree. This is really useful especially when is expected that this component would be used multiple times in a HTML document. It leads to more maintainable code. Other than that, Vue.js also enables you to create multiple components using its special for loop attribute, and conditional rendering can also be done through their if, else-if, else attribute. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
If you did not know, my colleague Nadia is also using Vue.js as part of her work at the moment. Like her, I would also be using the same set of tools for development – i.e Vue.js, Vuetify and Axios.
We were already planning to have the user interface design be inspired by the Netflix’s user interface. Then Dr Shawn had other kick ass ideas as well. It is amazing how he is able to come up with so many ideas in a short period of time. I’m told to try out some of them as we do not know yet which one would yield the best user experience. As of now, I do not know exactly how I am gonna implement all of it, but I guess if there’s a will, there’s a way. I would end here with a quote from what Dr Shawn always told me himself:
“It can be done.”
– Dr Shawn
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