Introduction
As a founder or a CTO of a product startup that is just beginning to set the pace in the respective industry, it is an important decision for the leadership team to narrow down on a framework for the said product. In the current era, you can find an app for almost every need. Which means that the developers who work behind the scenes must be comfortable with the framework on which the product is built on, so that they can make relevant upgrades, launch new features with less market go-to time, and keep up with their competitors and the evolving trends.
Why should we select the right framework in the early stages?
Selecting the right framework for your product requires very close scrutiny and thorough research. Now, it is, in fact, possible for a company to, say, adopt Angular in the beginning stages of product development and after a few years, they could decide to migrate their codebase into React or Vue. While it’s a very common practice for many enterprise software applications, which were built during the internet revolution in the 2000s, today’s apps or product owners simply cannot afford to invest their time and money into migrating to an altogether different framework. Customers want their features faster, which puts pressure on the developers to ship new features pretty much every week.
Picking the right framework in the initial days of product development also enables you to work with the right engineers. For instance, if your application is set to be built on the react js framework, you could hire react js developers to further improve your code. Over the years, when your product has brought in a significant amount of revenue, these dedicated react js developers would further add value to the company and pass along their learnings to new developers.
Common Questions to Consider While Choosing a Framework
The following are some very basic questions, which you should ask yourselves or your product managers while narrowing down on a framework selection:
- What syntax are you comfortable with? – Vue uses an HTML-based template syntax whereas React uses JSX, an extension of JavaScript. Even though Vue renders JSX, it’s not very well supported. As a CTO, if you’re not comfortable with the template-based syntax, you should probably hire react js developers.
- How will your customers engage with your product? – Both React and Vue is lightweight frameworks when compared to Angular and are a great pick for web application development. However, since React extensively uses libraries, it is suitable for developing native iOS and Android apps, whereas Vue is a common pick for developing single-page applications.
- Does your app rely heavily on server-side rendering? – Server-side rendering (SSR) is important for certain aspects of app development. For example, apps that support a lot of transactions like eCommerce or a ticket booking platform, need SSR to load pages faster. In React, you need Redux libraries to perform SSR, but it can ultimately increase code complexity. Using Vue, you can configure the production-ready application and write a universal code using Nuxt.js.
- Do you need to get started before your competitors, or should you focus on the long run? – Similar to point 1, you need to first understand if your developers are comfortable in working with either JSX or HTML template based syntaxes. Simply put, React promotes code reusability and simpler unit testing, whereas Vue is easier and quicker to learn for a fairly new programmer.
Conclusion
This article only gives a brief perspective from a CTO’s point of view, who might need to make a difficult decision someday that will determine the product or the company’s future itself. However, professional full-stack developers will tell you that both React and Vue are good enough and come with their own set of use cases.
If you look at the current job market, companies and startups are racing to hire react developers when compared to engineers who had worked on the Vue framework. This gives us a broader idea that more lightweight products are now dependent on React since the framework has proved to be stable for companies such as Netflix, Uber, etc. On the other hand, Vue is much easier to learn, adapt, and implement and is a more structured framework that reduces project duration; hence, the features are shipped to the end-customer asap.