Progressive Decoupling

Today, Drupal developers must acknowledge that when building a rich, stateful user-facing interface, it is best to use a modern JavaScript framework. Although less framework-driven JavaScript approaches like vanilla JavaScript and jQuery were good enough for many years, I have started to realize that my criteria for whether a piece of UX “should use a framework” has gotten pretty darn low.

Fortunately, even if Drupal is serving your site’s pages, it is possible to make use of React to build components. Some people refer to this method as “progressive decoupling.”

As mentioned in our first post, refactoring the Presentation Framework originally built for weather.com to be javascript framework agnostic and work with Angular 2 presented us with some interesting challenges. Today, I’ll talk about the second big problem we encountered when building out this system - how do we allow the exact same component to be placed on a page multiple times?

In choosing to adopt a framework without an official release, there were problems to be overcome as well. The biggest complication we encountered was that since the project is still in beta, much of the documentation is not fleshed out, and some of the specific architectural challenges we were trying to solve were not documented anywhere at all.

One of the requests of the Wunderground team in beginning this effort, was that instead of starting a new project using Angular 1, they wanted to push into new territory and use the not-yet-released Angular 2.