The TAB’s feedback on JavaScript front-end frameworks and TypeScript
Front-end frameworks
OCC has been experimenting with feature-rich JavaScript frameworks. One of the current forerunners is React, which we used in our Pegasus project to enable component-based dynamic web UI.
For a new ContrOCC web project, we compared React to Vue.js, which is increasing in popularity and offers several advantages over React. However, although Vue.js does solve some of the issues we found using React on Pegasus, this does not outweigh the problems we discovered using Vue.js in an ASP.Net MVC context. Therefore, React is our preference for the ContrOCC web project.
TypeScript
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that offers some extremely useful features over normal JavaScript including:
- static type-checking / type-inference
- ES2015 (the latest version of JavaScript) support, compiling to ES5 (previous version) for browser support if necessary
- full Visual Studio IntelliSense across all TypeScript files
OCC teams have used it on many projects now and found there is a low cost/learning-curve for some valuable improvements. If you’re a C# developer, it will also help you feel a bit more at home writing scripts.
Strongly consider simply making all your JavaScript files TypeScript instead – because it’s a superset of JS this will just work and you can begin making use of TypeScript features as you wish.
