Ask HN: How do you build complex web apps with vanilla JavaScript

5 points by sunsetSamurai 4 years ago | 1 comment

Hello everyone, I wanted to ask you how do you learn to build complex web apps by just using javascript? It seems to be a common thing to complain in HN about bloated websites with a heavy use of js and frameworks, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29703546.

Every time I try to build anything more complex than a weather app, my codebase becomes a mess. I'm still very new to software development and I still have a lot to learn, so maybe that's part of the problem. How do you manage your app state, how do you get back your state after a crash or a refresh? All these seem difficult to accomplish without a framework.

Any good courses, blogs, repos to study in order to learn this? Thank you!

jsprogram 4 years ago |

Some of the vanilla JavaScript methods come from libraries, for example querySelector and fetch. It used to take a few lines of code and a callback to do a XHR in JavaScript, then it was replaced by fetch. In the older example, you can just use querySelector and fetch from the library then ignore the rest of the library.

You can also look for libraries that are short, for example Redux. It was much shorter than Flux but was so much better that the Flux creators recommended Redux.