Why I do still loving Aurelia in 2020
Let's start by the beginning. In 2016 I was in my second year working as a backend programmer and recently graduated from the institute. During all that time, I was focused on the Java ecosystem, and just in some special situations, I had to deal with HTML and jQuery.
Project demands changed and I was challenged to get out of my comfort zone: Start working focused on a front-end project. I had no experience with any JS framework of that time, just tried AngularJS once for an academic project, and to be honest, was a nightmare. Thankfully, the project also demanded to work with emerging technologies and I was introduced to Aurelia.
At first look, it was a little similar to how a Java project is structured: Services, dependency injection, classes (we decided to use ES6), controllers. For a person with zero knowledge in JS projects, Aurelia is the perfect match. Some frameworks such Angular2 enforced you to learn concepts such as modules, directives, Typescript. React, on the other hand, enforces you to learn JSX. For me, the most attractive thing is Aurelia it's based on convention over configuration, and believe, that changed everything.
Create components, add routing, implement behaviors. Too easy and too clean. The simple fact you have a pure javascript file with all your system logic (annotations, dependencies injections, business logic) and other pure Html file defining just how your application looks very organized and keep the project easy to maintain and add more features.
This is the first project I collaborated using Aurelia:
Sometime later, working on another company, I was encouraged to make a revamp of an older web application. I developed several PoC using different JS frameworks — React, Angular, Ember, Aurelia. I discovered the most similar to Aurelia was Ember, but the same way as others, you were forced to learn the own framework syntax to interact with your components.
Aurelia had just one problem: Low popularity. The majority of companies just look at how many other companies use some framework or tool to make the final decision, and unlike other frameworks, Aurelia isn't sponsored by some big company — such Google or Facebook.
Things are changing now. Microsoft has developed their career pages using Aurelia!
And it is not the only one. You may find a lot of companies now whose trust in this awesome framework too:
And Aurelia2 is nearer than never…
So, I decided to create my own professional presentation page using Aurelia. After 4 years, I had to admit I felt the same satisfaction to work with a strong framework that allowed me to create a web application in a very short time. You can see the result here:
The source code is available here for anyone whose like how it looks and wants to customize for their own personal presentation or company page— just editing one JSON file :D
Once again, I’m sure I won't use any other js library (for personal purposes) different from Aurelia. Time is a very limited resource and that's just what I save using this framework.
The book I wrote about Aurelia in 2018 stills available if you want to go deeper learning how this framework works, integrate whit a backend service, and deploy to any cloud provider.
And finally, I let you some interesting articles explaining why you should start using aurelia with technical explanations and benchmarks with other frameworks.
Remember, the best programmer is an educated programmer. Cheers!
