Why I chose Vue.js over React

In the middle of 2015 I was working together with Zack Katz on the GravityView plugin and we knew we needed to improve the user experience configuring a view in the WordPress admin.

We developed a very fancy drag-n-drop interface where the user was able to pick some Gravity Forms fields and build a table or a list view with the form entries. We shipped this interface with the first plugin version all done with jQuery and jQuery UI. Unfortunately, the JavaScript file was big enough to make me start sweating as soon as I needed to dive in for some bug fixing and it was almost impossible to add new features without breaking anything.

jQuery was not an option anymore…

So I proposed we use a modern JS framework. By the time React was starting to gain some momentum among WordPress folks, so it made sense to try it.

At that time I was really fresh with vanilla JavaScript, I didn’t know anything about NPM, bundlers or transpiling, and React was completely new to me.

I started to experiment rewriting the existing GravityView admin interface using React.

Oh god, it was really hard.

One of the first things I dealt with was JSX and all the new world of this pseudo HTML flavor. With JSX came the need to use Webpack or browserify, and then Babel and a bunch of other modules to bundle some working code.

I failed. I didn’t have time to learn and master all this new JS paraphernalia and I abandoned the new interface project.