Impressions on Svelte (non pro)

I guess i’m vulnerable to the new shiny thing syndrome. I wasn’t looking for any kind of web framework (as usual), as i was clicking Svelte is the most beautiful web framework I’ve ever seen (as usual).

Background

Building the backends, frontend development seemed pretty chaotic to me for a long time. React paved the way. First time i felt comfortable structuring JavaScript.

With many available component libraries, it was easy enough to get my first web apps (https://pdf2md.morethan.io, https://jmh.morethan.io) up and running even though my knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS was lacking.

Fast forward to Svelte

Documentation of Svelte is pretty good. It has a neat tutorial, a simple but helpful API documentation and a examples section (which is more or less an replication of the tutorial).

Getting started is really simple. Bootstrap a running hello world app up with these 3 commands:

npx degit sveltejs/template
npm install
npm run dev

To get into Svelte, I decided to build a simple numerology calculator for names (Nanuca). I found it pretty straight forward to get up to speed, and looking back at the API documentation after the first evening, i was amazed that there isn’t so much stuff to learn anyway.

Impressions and thoughts

• Easy to start, cushy learning curve.
• Less concepts to master, less boilerplate then React.
• It forced me to learn more CSS and JS basics (which was a good thing to me at this point in time)
• — React has an amazing ecosystem. Lots of predefined components available. You don’t have to master HTML/CSS to build something great.
• — Every once in a while however i run into a simple problem which took annoyingly long to solve without that basic knowledge.
• Even something fairly complex like animations and transitions are pretty simple to master.
• There is a out-of-the-box store implementation which takes some time to get used to, but probably less then the Redux and co thing.
• With so many amazing component-based frameworks out there, it seems beneficial to build JavaScript libraries which are not tight to one framework in particular.

Simply said… i’m just enjoying working in Svelte. It’s simple, it’s powerful, it never stepped in my way so far! So this time, i’m pretty happy i fell pray to Svelte is the most beautiful web framework I’ve ever seen.

More

There is probably a lot of more to say about what Svelte is and how it works… but i leave that to the masters of JavaScript. This small writeup might be a good starting point for going into the theoretical background.

Find the code of the example project here: [https://nanuca.morethan.io]