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Reliable front-end building blocks

Having just shipped a big “single-page app” project, I think it would be useful to list all of its dependencies among the current climate of dependency burnout in front-end land. Those were all very stable and easy to combine.

  • React – I’m not doing any JS front-end without React these days. The development experience is amazing, and they have done a terrific job at being highly stable over time. It’s always a pleasure to upgrade the React version.
  • Redux – Very stable and reliable, high learning curve but high reward too
  • D3 (v3) – One of my favorite tools. Can’t wait for v4 to be out, the main issue with D3 as it stands now is that I’m only using a fifth of its features but still shipping it all in my JS
  • Springload’s reusable components react-simpler-select, react-svg-icon, react-accessible-modal Because for UI elements you likely want to have your own touch.
  • Flexbox – Such a pleasure to build layouts with this, if browser support isn’t too advanced (no IE10 and below)
  • react-autosuggest – A nice UI component that took care of what’s hard - keyboard interactions and accessibility
  • react-router – Probably the least stable of all of those building blocks, but they have done a better job at this since version 2.
  • Browserify + gulp builds – Webpack might be better, but its documentation / ease of use is not.

Other goodies: