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Hi, I'm one of the creators of Django. For what it's worth, here's what I do for my product Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/). I've been working on it full-time for 12 years, so a lot of thought has gone into this.

Soundslice is very complex in its front-end JavaScript. It has an entire sheet-music rendering engine, capable of "responsive" sheet music [1], plus an integrated audio/video player for music practice, a full-fledged sheet music/tab editor [2] and a ton more [3].

In short: we don't use any JS frameworks. It's just vanilla JS — and in this day and age, that is totally fine for building a quality product.

We're disciplined in how the JS logic is structured, trying to find the right abstractions for the concepts of our app, and we use native JS/DOM APIs (which are full-featured these days).

Every web page on our site is served by Django — in other words, there's no single-page-app stuff. I've always found the idea of single-page apps to be "against the grain": it goes against how web browsers are optimized, and it goes against how HTTP/HTML were designed. Plus it adds a ton of complexity that mainly benefits the maintainers of front-end JS frameworks (it gives them power over you).

I think an entire generation of web developers has been misled into assuming JS frameworks are table stakes for building high-quality web apps — and that is 100% wrong.

The time-tested pattern of "serve the initial HTML (with Django or whatever), then add functionality with JavaScript" is solid and helps you build high-quality, maintainable websites.

On a meta note: for years I've sat on the sidelines and rolled my eyes at the frontend JS world, knowing it doesn't affect me or my product. But I've come to realize all web developers — including those who don't choose to use frontend frameworks — do indeed have a vested interest in pushing back against the bullshit. That's because the JS frameworks are making the web crappier, and that affects us all by giving the web a worse reputation. Sites load slower, UI is weird/buggy/non-standard, and the culture perpetuates (meaning it's harder to find developers who know "actual" JS instead of frameworks).

[1] https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/basic/100/resizing...

[2] https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/

[3] https://www.soundslice.com/features/




I basically agree with you, and I love developing a full stack via JS.

Fortunately, with AI, coding with frameworks is a lot less necessary and even more of a hassle now.




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