3 Minutes with Kent

Concerning Libraries and Frameworks: Build or Install

01.21.2021 - By Kent C. DoddsPlay

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Hi there so today I wanted to talk about the merits of a framework I get

this question quite often like when do I decide to bring in a framework or

even just bringing in libraries versus just build it yourself. And so first

on like the framework side of things if you're building something that's

like basically a HTML page or you're doing some surveyor server template

thing and you just need to enhance your app a little bit with some

JavaScript so therefore it's more of a website than an app.

Then yeah, you probably don't need a framework the browser differences are

pretty.Smooth to over by now and yeah you may not need a framework in that

case, but like my audience of the the people that I'm working with mostly

are very primarily focused on building web applications and for that if you

don't want to build or use a framework and and they're legitimate reasons

to not want to use a framework, but if you don't what is going to happen is

you're going to build a framework for yourself.

Eventually, you'll build abstractions for everything. And the difference

between your framework and one of the more popular andTry to true

frameworks is your framework is used by only you and it is not battle

tested. It is also maybe not even tested. It hasn't gone through the rigor

of being deployed to production by lots of other people and so there are a

lot of bugs that you just don't know about.

And so I would really strongly advise against building your own framework

unless you have just some very particular needs that none of the other

frameworks can satisfy. And I would suggest that 99.9% of applications

the,That you would build for the web there's a framework that is well

suited for the task And in fact most frameworks can cover 90% of the needs

of most web applications today.

I'm sure. So even deciding between which framework is less of an important

point at this point, they can all pretty much do what you want them to do.

And so as far as like libraries when should it just bring in libraries? I

mean, there's always the risk of you know, some security vulnerability.

There's there's this article a while ago about somebody who's been stealing

credit card credentials because they published something to.NPM which of

course that was not true they'd hadn't actually done that but they were

saying this is a thing that I could have done and it absolutely is and it's

terrifying but do you want to build a product or do you want to build a

bunch of libraries.

Because ultimately if you don't use libraries to do things you're going to

build your own and there's nothing wrong with that. You can like copy some

code and and put it into your vendor directory or something like that. Like

there's nothing wrong with that. You can totally do that.

But it is a trade-off and you just need to acknowledge that fact. So, I

can't give you a solid answer on that but hopefully that was at least

thought provoking for you. Have a nice day.

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