Laying the Foundation

May 24, 2021

See the code for this post on GitHub

My UI-first approach to this project led me to choose an application architecture that favors quick, simple static hosting for the front-end with a serverless back-end. I considered platforms like Netlify and Vercel, but Microsoft had recently released Azure Static Web Apps for general availability and it caught my eye. I'm comfortable in the Microsoft ecosystem because of my day job, so SWA seemed like a natural fit. It allows me to easily fit the front-end to Azure's serverless features down the road when I need them

For the front-end JavaScript framework, I wanted to use something I'm not as familiar with—Svelte. Most of the UI work I do at my job (which, admittedly, has been few-and-far-between the last couple years) is in Angular. I've used other frameworks in the past, but I had been looking for an excuse to learn some Svelte for a while. It seems to address a lot of sources of frustration with other frameworks, particularly around tooling and state management.

With a JavaScript framework picked out, I started looking into potential UI component libraries. I considered a couple Material implementations for Svelte, as well as a lightweight library using the Chota CSS framework, but in the end I settled on Sveltestrap, a Svelte implementation of Bootstrap. It offers a nice balance of features, familiarity, and maturity in a component library.

With all of those decisions made, it was quick work to throw up a quick Hello World project in Azure.