VueJS Amsterdam: A Recap Of The Latest Frontend Technologies

Software Development

Recently, our frontend team had the opportunity to attend the largest Vue conference that took place in Amsterdam from 28th to 29th February 2024. How it was and what new information we learned, you can find out below.

What even is Vue.js?

If you are not already familiar, Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework that we use in most of our apps to provide our clients with performant, dynamic, and easy-to-use web interface solutions. The Vue.js community has many enthusiasts from all over the world and is getting more popular as the years go by. So organising such events where developers can get together and share their enthusiasm is a must. The largest and most special of these events happens in Amsterdam and our team was part of it!

The state of Vue

The conference was opened by none other than Evan You, the founder of Vue.js framework and also the founder of Vite, a bundler that helps us compile Vue.js for usage in a web browser. He gave an insight into the current state of Vue and Vite. He shared his journey with Vue which started as his small, personal project, how the community grew over time, breaking changes and other challenges they faced along the way. He also shared some exciting news about upcoming changes in a new release. The most notable one is Vue Vapor mode which aims to greatly improve the performances of Vue applications ultimately making the end user experience even better. In other words, the future brings exciting changes that we cannot wait to implement in our projects!

Talks and Vue Community

Most talks were held by many members of the Vue core team and community partners and also members of Vue teaching programs like Vue School and Vue Mastery. All of these people have different working experiences and backgrounds and they all work together to bring us the best possible solutions.

Vue.js team has expanded and created many other tools that makeup Vue’s ecosystem. One of these tools is Vitest, a Vite native testing framework used to perform unit tests. So naturally, some lectures focused on the testing of Vue.js applications which is often the crucial step in the development process. The topic of many talks was Nuxt, another important tool that functions as a meta-framework for building full-stack applications in Vue and offers features like server-side rendering and static site generation.

Variety of topics

The talks covered a variety of topics. Some of them served as useful reminders for our everyday code writing. For example, Daniel Kelly, a member of Vue School, gave us a talk about some common mistakes developers make in Vue.js. Other talks introduced us to some exciting tools and features inside the Vue.js ecosystem. One of these talks was about TresJS by Alvaro Saburido Rodriguez, a library manipulating 3D graphics in Vue.js. The presenter showed how it is very accessible and easy to use, it certainly makes us want to give it a try! And one particular talk was pure fun. It was a talk by Tim Benniks. He presented a program in Vue.js that enabled him to play guitar without additional technical equipment. We also participated in a show because we got to vote for songs that we wanted him to play. For a moment it seemed like we were at a real rock concert!

Open source development

All of the Vue tools are open-source libraries, so presenters stressed the importance of open-source development. Publishing and maintaining libraries and packages is no easy task, but the presenters tried to inspire everyone with their positive examples and openness. They encouraged developers to start by simply making contributions and suggestions for improvements to repositories. After all, that is how the Vue community started and slowly expanded over time.

Business Networking

In some of these talks, the speakers presented the newest software tools for building complex user interfaces. One of these is for example FormKit, a framework for handling forms in Vue or PrimeVue, a complete library for all kinds of components and templates. These presenters and other members of the Vue team had their stands where we could come and ask them different questions about their programs, libraries, etc. This is a great way to decide if we want to incorporate some of these technologies into our applications.

Some of these stands offered some fun coding challenges where we could win different prizes or they did live presentations where everyone could participate in a discussion. Everyone was really friendly and open to questions which made the networking part of the conference an enjoyable experience.

In conclusion, VueJS Amsterdam 2024 was a very informative, fun, and memorable experience. We would like to thank all the organizers for their efforts and of course Vue.js team members for their enthusiasm which enables us to have these sorts of events. We hope to see them all again next year.