With the decision to tackle a new web-based software project, the next decision is what web-based UI framework to build the app in. My last web-based software project was to build an UI for SGVHAK rover at the beginning of the year. In the fast-paced world of front-end web development, that's ancient history.

The rover UI project used Materialize CSS library to create an interface that follows Google's Material Design guidelines. At the time, Google offered web developers a library called "Material Design Lite" but with the caveat they're revamping the entire web development experience. There was little point in climbing the learning curve for a deprecated library like MDL. As Materialize CSS was close to using Bootstrap, a known quantity, the choice was appropriate for the situation.

Now, at the end of the year, we have Google's promised revamp in the form of Material Design Components for Web. I am still a fan of Material so my signal generator utility project LRWave will be my learning project to use Google's new library.

Diving right into the Getting Started Guide during a local coding meetup, I got as far as the end of "Step 1" executing npm start when I ran into my first error :

ERROR in ./app.scss
    Module build failed: SyntaxError: Unexpected token {
        at exports.runInThisContext (vm.js:53:16)
        at Module._compile (module.js:374:25)
        at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:417:10)
        at Module.load (module.js:344:32)
        at Function.Module._load (module.js:301:12)
        at Module.require (module.js:354:17)
        at require (internal/module.js:12:17)

[...]

webpack error

Since app.scss was only three lines for Step 1, it was trivial to verify there's no typo to account for an unexpected "{". A web search for this error message implicated an out-of-date installation of NodeJS, which triggered a memory from when I first started experimenting with NodeJS on my installation of Ubuntu 16.04. When trying to run node at the command line, a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04 would tell the user:

The program 'node' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install nodejs-legacy

That suffix "legacy" is a pretty good hint this thing is old. Running node --version returned v4.2.6. Checking the Node JS website, today's LTS is v10.14.2 and latest is 11.4.0. So yes, 4.2.6 is super old! Fortunately there's a pointer to a more updated set of binaries maintained by Nodesource that plays well with Ubuntu's built-in package management system. Following those directions automatically uninstalled legacy binaries and replaced them with up-to-date versions.

Once I'm running on non-ancient binaries, I could continue following MDC Web's Getting Started guide on my computer. But this experience motivated me to look into a different option...