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018 VUE More With Less, with John Farrar

By Michaela Light Leave a Comment

John Farrar talks about “VUE more with less” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

John is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about VUE more with less.

In his ITB talk, John shares how to learn to move beyond jQuery with super friendly JavaScript with VueJS 2.

Show notes

Here are some of the topics talked about in the episode:

  • What is VueJS?
    • A progressive web app (not single page app)
    • Closer to a desktop app in behavior
    • How to know when to jump into a new framework
  • Why he used to avoid JavaScript (and how it advanced ColdFusion)
  • Why he moved beyond jQuery
  • What problems do the JS frameworks solve
    • jQuery – abstracts out the browser JavaScript differences
    • React – data states in a single page responsive UI using a shadow copy of the DOM
      • MVVM solution
    • Angular – solve the same problem as React but is fully object oriented
      • No version numbers – it is backward compatible and progressive
    • VueJS – building an interactive site with super friendly code
      • Great documentation in English on their site even though it was created in China
      • The most approachable of these JS frameworks
  • Why he is concerned about mounting technical debt in companies today
    • Rank your most critical issues and first the most important first
    • Create automated tests to make sure that past technical debt does not come back
    • A public company technical debt clock
      • Check company moral!
  • How to pick a framework (hint – it is not just popularity contest)
    • Solves the problem you have
      • Why do I really want to use a JavaScript library
    • It is fun
    • The same to Googlebot with or without the framework
    • A growing and thriving community and docs, training courses – to get answers to questions
    • The community has viable funding
    • Is it validated in real-world solutions
  • The challenges being in the framework Olympic circle
    • Vue, Angular and React
    • None are the cult solution
  • How VueJS make JavaScript super friendly
    • VueX and how to stick your data in name spaces
  • The interesting story of how JavaScript has evolved over the years
    • Pre-rendering on a Node.JS server
    • Webkit JS clean up compile step
  • Why are you proud to use CF?
  • WWIT to make CF more alive this year?
    • CF is thriving in the intranets
    • Super B2B tool
    • CommandBox
    • What is CF’s market? + Lucee hits new markets
    • Teach CFers how to build better community
  • What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Mentioned in this episode

Listen to the Audio

Bio

John Farrar

John Farrar is an active CF community member who focuses on a strategy that will bring impact without getting delayed by over- engineering.

John Farrar started programming in the late 70's on a Commodore PET. He served in the U.S.Navy and then met his wife during his reservist years. This was when the Amiga drove his computer interest for several years. Eventually, he became a web developer and in the later 90's he started using ColdFusion building dynamic websites.

With about twenty years of web development, John has become known for his work with jQuery, Knockout and Vue AJAX libraries. Sustainable and profitable come together when the right technology is applied to the correct challenges. John enjoys focusing on a strategy that will bring impact without getting delayed by over engineering.

Learn more about John Farrar at:

(* WWIT = What Would It Take)

Interview transcript

Michaela Light:                  Welcome back to the show, I'm here with John Farrar, and he is an active community member in the ColdFusion community, and he focuses o a strategy that will bring impact without getting delayed over engineering. We're going to talk a bit about that more later. He's giving a talk called Vue More With Less. Which I think there's a pun in there, because Vue is a JavaScript library. We're going to be covering what is Vue.js, for those folks who haven't figured that out yet, and how he used to avoid JavaScript, and how it advanced ColdFusion, because he did that. Why he moved beyond jQuery, what problems do the various JS frameworks solve, and how you should pick a framework. Hint there, it's not just a popularity contest guys.

The interesting story of how JavaScript has evolved over the years, how Vue.js makes JavaScript super-friendly. The challenges of being in the framework's Olympic circle, and why he's concerned about the mounting technical debt in companies today. Now I'm not talking about the US national debt, it's technical debt. So welcome John.

John Farrar:                        Hello, glad to be here.

Michaela Light:                  Yes, hello, welcome to the podcast. So glad you're here. What exactly is Vue.js?

John Farrar:                        Vue.js is another one of those libraries, and I'll probably talk on that later, some of the things you mentioned there. But Vue.js when version one was out it was really cool looking, had a lot of promise, but it wasn't holistic enough that I was ready to drop an investment of my time and encouraging others to. When version two shipped, it really took off. What Vue.js is, a lot of use have heard of the phrase, single-page applications, I'm a part of the people out here who are trying to change that phrase because when you use a phrase that doesn't describe it well, it confuses people.

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