I still remember the first web project I made in college: a website about my favorite X-Men character, Wolverine.
The site was quite basic and rough around the edges, but I loved being able to create something for the web that was flexible and expressed my ideas.
However, I found the actual development process—working directly with HTML and CSS—to be somewhat cumbersome.
I haven't dabbled much in web development since mobile development—especially Flutter—sparked my interest.
Jaspr website.
Luckily, that's where the beauty of Jaspr comes in; it addresses some of the challenges with web development and offers a better experience for developers.
It's built using Dart and has a very similar feel to Flutter, even though it targets an entirely different platform.
In fact, you don't use any Flutter in a Jaspr app at all (unless you plan to embed some widgets).
In Jaspr, the concept of Components is inspired by the concept of Widgets in Flutter.
Over the Christmas break, I've been using Jaspr to rebuild my original website (which was built using Flutter Web) to feel like a true website rather than a web app.
The cool part is it looks like a normal widget, but it actually gets compiled into valid HTML and CSS for the web.
Since it's a web framework, it uses CSS, which means I can easily integrate a CSS framework like Bulma and build my own components from there.
Bulma site.
Jaspr offers several advantages that I've noticed:
- Improved SEO (search engines can better index the content)
- Better routing architecture (supports both single-page and multi-page routing using a server/client approach)
- Faster load times (the app is significantly lighter than a typical Flutter web app)
If you're looking to learn a new framework, enjoy web development but prefer alternatives to conventional methods, or simply have been exposed to Flutter in some way, I highly recommend checking it out.
Major kudos to the creators of both projects: Kilian Schulte for Jaspr and Jeremy Thomas for Bulma. Stay tuned for further progress.