Frontend Architecture for Design Systems

Chapter 6. JavaScript

While many would argue that JavaScript should not be a required part of our web technology stack, it is nonetheless an integral part of many of the websites we build today. Whether you are building a small portfolio site, a corporate customer portal, or a shopping website, there will inevitably be a time where you are asked to build something that can’t be done with HTML and CSS alone. This might be a carousel and an image light box, or it might be a full client-side application.

This book is primarily focused on creating scalable and sustainable design systems, so I will focus on helping you plan your project and identifying quality code. I’ll leave the “how to create a <insert random noun>.js–based web application” to the many other books that cover those topics. Actually, while we’re talking about web applications, let’s first take a moment to cover the important topic of selecting the perfect framework.

Selecting Frameworks

The first thing to get out of the way is that there is no single, perfect JavaScript framework. This chapter is not going to give you a quick answer to whether you should be using AngularJS or ReactJS. I won’t even try to list all of the available options, because by the time this book is printed, the list will be full of deprecated projects, and no doubt missing the newest, hottest frameworks.

What I can tell you is this: it’s very possible that you don’t actually need a framework at all. Instead of focusing on which frameworks and ...