After going through Codecademy's "Learn Vue.js" course, I went to Vue.js site and followed through their quick start "Creating a Vue Application" procedure to see what a "Hello World" looks like. It was quite instructive and showed me many facets of Vue not covered by Codecademy's course.

The first difference is here we're creating an application with Vue.js, which means firing up command line tool npm init vue@latest to create an application scaffolding with select features. Since I'm a fan of TypeScript and of maintaining code formatting, I said yes to "TypeScript", "ESLint" and "Prettier" options and no to the rest.

I then installed all the packages for that scaffolding with npm install and then I ran npm run build to look at the results in /dist/ subdirectory. They added up to a little over 60 kilobytes, which is roughly one-third built size of Angular's scaffolding. This is even more impressive considering that several kilobytes are placeholders: about a half dozen markup files plus a few SVG files for vector graphics. The drastically smaller file sizes of Vue apps are great, but what have I given up in exchange? That's something I'll be looking for as I learn more about both platforms.

Poking around in the scaffolding app, I saw it demonstrated use of Vue componentization via its SFC (Single File Component) file format. A single *.vue file contained a component's HTML, CSS, and TypeScript/JavaScript. Despite the fact they are all text-based formats and designed to coexist, I'm not a fan of mixing three different syntax in a single file. I prefer Angular's approach of keeping each type in their own file. To mitigate confusion, I expect Vue's editor tool Volar would help keep the three types distinct.

Some Vue components in the example are tiny like IconTooling.vue which is literally a wrapper around a chunk of SVG to deliver a vector-graphic icon. Others are a little more substantial like WelcomeItem whose template has three slots for information: #icon, #heading, and everything else. This feels quite different from how Angular components get data from their parents. I look forward to learning more about this style of code organization.

While running npm run build I noticed this Vue app boilerplate build pipeline didn't use webpack, it used something called Vite instead. Since I couldn't make heads or tails of webpack on my first pass, I was encouraged that I could understand a lot more of Vite.