Why Im thinking about moving away from VueJs

May 19, 2021

I have spent the last year maintaining and building a VueJs Application, vue was chosen because of great documentation, being easy to get up and started as well as the great packages that and 1st party ecosystem such as VueX.

Recently I started a new project which got me really excited. An opportunity to do some things differently, introduce typescript and get to try VueJs 3.0, Unfortunately so far it’s raised more questions than answers like all good things.

NPM Packages breaking in VueJs 3.0

Packages that my project was using such as MirageJs, Vue-Formulate & AutoSearch have broken so far in the upgrade to Vue 3.0, These are community backed packages, these people have full time jobs and have delivered excellent packages to the community who uses these packages. While i understand that it’s only 3 packages that appear not to work with VueJs so far, this has left me wondering what else may be broken as a part of the VueJs ecosystem when moving to vue 3.0, alternatively alternative packages are available.

Build in Vue 2.6

This seems like the obvious choice to me, I know Vue and I know the ecosystem in VueJs 2.6 well enough to be productive with, as well as continuing to use the packages I have grown to love. My biggest concern at the moment is the time spent building in 2.6 to have to upgrade everything later on will introduce undesired re-work in the future.

Anything but Angular

With the breaking changes in the packages in VueJs 3.0 I find myself questioning if maybe now is the time to invest in learning a new JS Framework while the community packages catch up and become compatible with v3.0. I do not want to have to leave but also can’t afford to wait.

At the moment I am considering moving the project to React JS and invest time in finding new packages and learning the in’s and out’s of the framework, It’s hard to know if this a good decision or even if it will pay off, but i currently find myself torn on using either VueJs 2.6 or 3.0 and moving towards a new framework such as React.

Wrapping up

Even if i move i think i will be looking for another opportunity to go back to VueJs since it’s the framework that made me feel that i too could be a competent Front end developer, while it’s still hard to know if moving away is the right choice vs staying on 2.6 i’m sure i will find out the answer soon enough.