I remember it was about two months ago when I was talking with Eduardo Lanchares about the best stack for the next webapp. Sometimes you are at work and you are stuck with the current set-up of frameworks and tools that are quite difficult to change or refactor. This forces you to always work with the same mentality not allowing you to test new approaches to solve problems.

Following our desire to learn new stuff to make our life easier, we wanted to experiment with new technology to build a side project with a complete new stack that fits better with the app requirements.

In that same week, a friend of mine was talking about a bug that was affecting him in the web client of Transmission. This bug was affecting more people because we found an open bug report in the tracker that was 2 years old. We decided to check the source code and try to fix it because we thought that would be a piece of cake. But a few hours later we discovered that was not as easy as we expected and at some point we gave up.

With all these things in mind we had the perfect scenario and excuse to start playing with a new side project. We decided to start building a new interface from scratch to understand new patterns, new approaches and discover what would be the next challenges for the ultimate interface.

Our experimental stack

Reviewing all of the features in the current Transmission web client, the stack we chose was React for the user interface, Mobx for the state management and CSS modules for all the stuff related with the application styles, with a new build process managed by Webpack.

On the other hand, and with the above stack in mind, we decided to use some best practices for the long term quality of this project. Some of these were things like a strict set of Eslint rules, unit tests, UI tests and internationalization.

With this decision we wanted to achieve a more reliable interface, better performance, security and correctness. In conclusion a better way to maintain this web application.

Demo

Other

With Edu, we presented this experimental project on the BarcelonaJS. Those are the slides: Presentation in BarcelonaJS