“Why We Didn’t Use A Framework”
I came across this interesting article by Nick Gauthier explaining in detail the journey they undertook when they built MeetSpace (a video conferencing app for distributed teams).
They started the project, in the same manner, most of us in the web development industry do, they evaluated the technical requirements of the project and assessed that against the skillset of the team assigned the project.
They contemplated using a front-end framework, but ultimately decided against a framework in favour of vanilla JavaScript.
He starts off the article by stating how this choice benefitted them in the form of having only one JavaScript file being requested from the server, amounting to a request size of just 2 KB. With their internet speeds (United States) and at the time of launching the website, that translated into a page load time of just 200 milliseconds! This would have been impossible had they gone with a framework.
He then explains how they went about creating rough designs for the various pages, categorising these designs into small and medium categories. Then they analysed those designs to determine the interactions they’d have on each page.
He goes on to discuss the experience in rather great detail. I would highly recommend you read this article.