From the course: Vue.js 2 for Web Designers

What is Vue and what is it good for? - Vue.js Tutorial

From the course: Vue.js 2 for Web Designers

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What is Vue and what is it good for?

- [Instructor] Over the next several videos, we're going to talk about some of the conceptual aspects of working with Vue, as well as the practical. Let's start with some basic questions and answers. First, what is Vue? It's a JavaScript library for creating user interfaces, and specifically identifies as progressive. Now progressive web apps is its own set of terminology. When Vue talks about being progressive, it means you can take your existing site and add Vue onto it easily without having to make a lot of changes. So who uses Vue? The Laravel project, which is a very popular php framework, is where I personally first heard about Vue, and I think that's probably true for a lot of developers who use both JavaScript and php. If you want to do front-end work in your Laravel php apps, Vue is what you're encouraged to use, and that has driven adoption to an extent. Vue is also used at places like MIT, NBC Sports, Trustpilot, among other large brands. The main attraction to me, though, is that Vue seems to be most popular with smaller businesses. It doesn't have the same degree of usage and popularity as React, but it's gaining, and the fact that it's so approachable makes it very popular for people working on smaller projects. Okay, so where does Vue work? Vue requires ECMAScript 5, which is pretty much any web browser these days, except for older versions of Internet Explorer. Vue supports rendering components on the server using the library vue-server-renderer, so you can serve any page that uses Vue with its components fully rendered as html, letting the browser take over from there. There are also frameworks for building native apps with Vue. Weex and NativScript are the main ones as of this recording. This is one area where Vue is not quite as far along as React is with React Native, but there are some very large companies supporting these efforts, and I expect them to continue to mature. For our purposes today, though, we're mainly interested in running Vue in the browser. How do I work with Vue? Well, pretty much any way you want. You can build an entire site or app using Vue, or you can just build one or more smaller pieces. The one or more smaller pieces version is what we'll be going with in this course. What is Vue good for? It's good for all the same things that React or Angular are good for. Making repeatable, reusable UI elements, or displaying any kind of data that will change over time as a user is interacting with a page. And of course, if you want to build a site or an app that's mostly or entirely JavaScript based, it works great. And again, having built a site this way you can still serve fully rendered html if you want to, with JavaScript taking over after the initial download for the smoothness and speed in the UI that we expect from JavaScript. And you can also use static site generators, like VuePress, to create a Vue based site and prerender it to static html files, so you don't have to deal with running a node based web server. One more note is that web components are different. Web components are a set of web standards for creating reusable components, which are just starting to come together. Vue derives some of its inspiration from the nascent custom elements APIs, which are part of the web component standard for how it's built. But when we talk about Vue components, they're different from standard web components. You can check out the course Learning Web Components for more on this.

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