One of the main pieces of advice that people give in learning programming is that you should pick a language and learn it. Just pick the language that you think you’ll most want to do, get a couple of classes or tutorials on it, and learn programming!
Have you ever worked on a coding problem and have to constantly stop to look up syntax? You’re almost at the solution to a problem and you know exactly what you need to do, you just don’t know exactly how to do it?
All in all, the Vue lifecycle methods are fairly straight forward. There’s even a helpful Vue lifecycle chart that describes when the various methods are called. All of that is super helpful.
UPDATE: I have a better way of handling this here. I would recommend that post if you’re looking to handle the status of your data loads from now on.
I hate ambiguous lag. Is this site still loading or did it freeze? Am I waiting for something or is this it? Whenever a website has to load in information from an API, there is a chance that loading will appear painfully slow to the user. Human beings perceive an empty screen much differently than they perceive an animation on the screen.1 In order to make our website seem faster than it is, it’s always good to throw in a loading animation every time that we have to access a potentially slow resource like an API call.
I talked before about how to query your back-end API from Vuex, but that was mainly centered on getting data. What happens when you want to save data to a back-end API after it is updated or added in the Vuex store? What’s the best, most efficient way to accomplish this?
There are a lot of things to worry about when it comes to Vue applications. You’ve got SPAs and routing and web workers and Jest and Cypress and everything else. It gets overwhelming pretty quickly. The hard part is not learning these technologies, it’s knowing what their place is in the application.
If there is one thing that I see developers looking into Vuex getting hung up on the most, it’s these weird map functions that are in Vuex. The syntax is just so damn weird. What the hell are these ... things doing? Why do I need them sometimes and not others?
Once you start using Vuex to manage the shared data of your Vue application, it becomes less clear on where or how to call your back-end API. I think everyone starts out making API calls in the created function of your component. But that doesn’t scale past a handful of components. Then, they end up loading in the same data over and over again and each component has it’s own copy, which is impossible to keep in sync. You lose the efficiency of having one part of the system in control of the data when you do that and on a larger application, this very quickly falls apart.
When I first started using Vue, one thing I got continually wrong was how to load an image into a Vue component dynamically. At first, I found that using an absolute URL worked, but that was only useful if I was storing the images on a CDN or other external site. If I included the images in my project, as either lightweight icons or static images, then using an absolute URL, with hostname and all, didn’t really work. What about when I wanted to test some new images locally or on a dev server? Linking directly to the images in production just wasn’t going to cut it.
One big question people have when building frontend applications is, what’s the best way to keep backend data synced with my frontend data? You seem to always get different answers from different people and the dreaded “It depends”. Well, what does it depend on?