A Magento Master at VueJS Amsterdam

Introduction

The blog title maybe says much already: First, I went to VueJS Amsterdam on February 20th and 21st and apparently it was worth a blog. Second, I still saw myself as a representative of the Magento community - being a three time Magento Master, working with Magento daily and putting a lot of energy into the headless Magento movement (when do you want it? now!).

So I went to Amsterdam, met up with many Vue-people (Vuers, Vuans, I don't know) and learned a lot: For instance, that few Vue developers actually have worked with SSR. Or that Nuxt is great. Or that lots of different backend languages (Java, .NET, Scalar, C++, PHP, Go) are combined with Vue on the frontend. Etcetera. I'm not going to write up the details of the conference - this is not meant as a review. You can find excellent posts via the tweets of @vuejsamsterdam.

Representatives of Magento at this Vue conference?

This is not a review of the conference. This is meant more as an internal braindump to review how Magento is growing towards a popular JavaScript project like VueJS. So the obvious question would be how many of the 1500 people were familiar with Magento.

The answer is: Very little. I met up with a couple of Magento developers (so, 3 in total), with a special mention on Maurits Meester (@mmeester) who has also written a couple of nice articles on his medium pages. Anyway, so very little Magento people at this Vue conference.

There were a couple of Vue Storefront people there though, especially Filip Rakowski, co-founder of Vue Storefront, who gave a talk on the roadmap of Vue Storefront with things like their UI library, Shopware integration and other awesomeness.

But few Magento people were there.

Connecting Vue and Magento

Maybe connecting Vue and Magento is not a big thing yet. For the Vue community, there are way too many e-commerce alternatives to choose from. Even more if you are not bound to PHP as a backend language. And Magento people, well, Magento people still appear to be struggling with the old Knockout frontend, instead of investing big time into a frontend that is much easier and therefore much more profitable. (Editor: This is a highly opinionated view.)

But it has to be said that Vue Storefront is currently changing this dilemma quickly: They are opening up Magento and other carts quickly to the Vue crowd. While their solution also becomes more and more popular with Magento developers. Vue is easy and you can build a Vue app yourself easily. Especially when it is a simple app. But thanks to Vue Storefront, complex e-commerce apps are not that difficult to build either in Vue anymore.

Nuxt?

I met up with various core members of Nuxt (among which Sébastien Chopin) and I have to say I was hoping for some e-commerce project based on Nuxt to be out there, without me being aware of it. There are multiple GitHub repositories combining something of e-commerce (like Strapi) with Nuxt, but no project has popped up ...

Well, no other project than Vue Storefront. Because Vue Storefront Next will be using NuxtJS for its internals. Which makes me say that maybe the biggest thing I got out this VueJS Amsterdam conference is an increased confidence in Vue Storefront.

How does this change Yireo?

If you have been keeping up with our blogs and tweets, you will notice that actually little changes here: My visit to this VueJS Amsterdam conference is part of a bigger scheme, a realization that we have been looking at other technologies for some time and liking it: React, Laravel, Symfony - playing with this tech for years already, but now realizing that it also offers a brighter future than just sticking with Magento only.

And with this gradual change comes also the adoptation of Vue Storefront. We have started working on some Vue Storefront projects, we have run our first Vue Storefront developer trainings and we continue to do so. And we are keen to contribute to various projects that the VSF team is currently running. Vue Storefront is part of our vision.

Reacticon v3 on the rise ... with VueJS

We are busy with other stuff as well: Reacticon version 3 will take place in a few months time - mid-June - in the Netherlands. And with this Magento frontend conference, we are again going to focus on various modern frontends for Magento, including the ones being built in Vue, like Vue Storefront.

I was excited to have touched the Vue community and proud that I got to know so many people so quickly. It really is a great community. And I'm happy to help developers find a good balance between the Magento community and Vue. Stay tuned!