What we took home from Vue.js Amsterdam

The past, present and future of Vue

First up was Evan You (for those who are new to Vue: this is the guy who created this awesome framework). He gave us some insight into the evolution of Vue over the past years. Interesting to hear, but as we're more focused on the future, our interest was piqued when he announced that vue-cli 3 was coming out of alpha that day.

Vue-cli is a command line tool to scaffold your brand new Vue app and this version brings a whole bunch of new features and improvements. Sarah Drasner (a Vue core team member and the last speaker of this conference) summed it up in one tweet:

Duuuude the new version (3) of Vue CLI is amazing ✨
Check it out, I can use the default, or select from a bunch of options, not limited to:
- TypeScript
- scss/sass/less/stylus
- unit/e2e testing
- class based syntax

And I can ask it to remember my settings! pic.twitter.com/QX9634zvfq

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) 7 februari 2018

The rest of the day was filled with great talks about all things Vue, from scaling Vue in an existing stack to speeding up your applications with the help of SSR (Server Side rendering), building custom reusable components and testing said components, but

The new API kid on the block

Guillaume Chau talked about 'Apollo, GraphQL and Vue: the ultimate stack'. Nowadays, most apps use REST to communicate between dissociated front-end and back-end or even multiple back-ends!

But ad-hoc and under-specified endpoints often lead to a mess that eats up energy and time from the developers. GraphQL, a new specification open-sourced by Facebook 3 years ago, aims to solve this kind of problems with a new approach. 

It brings many benefits like strong typing and validation, a new query language, predictable and hierarchical results, self-describing schema, auto-documentation... 

Apollo is a family of technologies you can incrementally add to your stack: Apollo Client to connect data to your UI, Apollo Engine for infrastructure and tooling, and GraphQL servers to translate backends into a GraphQL schema. And being the enthousiasts we are ... Vue.js is of course the framework in which we integrate the Apollo Client.

Coding on the go

My favorite speaker of the day, Ives van Hoorne, impressed with a talk about CodeSandbox, an online code editor tailored for web application development. He created this tool in his spare time after he got back from a holiday where he didn't have access to an editor so he couldn't reply to specific React questions he got.

He implemented Vue support and now the tool is a great way to share and contribute code. Take a look at the website, because there is to much to go over here. The guy is passionate about his work and listens to feedback from his userbase, as you can see on his twitter:

CodeSandbox got some Vue improvements based on the feedback at @vuejsamsterdam!

Added:
- ESLint support for .vue files.
- eslint-plugin-vue rules.
- Emmet run on `Tab` press for HTML.

There is more Emmet support coming! pic.twitter.com/FhGb4QMb7e

— Ives van Hoorne (@CompuIves) 21 februari 2018

Buzzwords galore

Sarah Drasner gave the last talk of the day and she chose one of the most used buzz words today: Serverless. Despite the name, Serverless does not mean you’re not using a server, rather, the promise of Serverless is to no longer have to babysit a server. Scaling is done for you, you’re billed only for what you use.

Instead of building a bunch of services for payments, geolocation, authentication ... yourself, you use an existing online service. So you and your team can focus on bringing something new to the table instead of building and supporting the same services time and time again.

Wrap-up

All in all this was a really great conference, we took home a lot of interesting ideas and even got to meet up with our frontend collegues from Have A Nice Day. 

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