Beyond Bootstrap: Building a Ridiculously Lightweight Cross-platform Responsive Framework

When it’s time to build out the front-end of your Office 365 or SharePoint application, there are lots of frameworks to choose from. Some are complete solutions and some give you just the SPA, the CSS, the data-binding, etc. And then there is Bootstrap; a CSS framework that does a great job of making websites usable on mobile devices. But what if you want more? What if you want a “proper” app? The choices can be overwhelming and some of the larger frameworks can end up seeming like black boxes that are performing magic. That’s why I built a very minimalistic framework, actually less a framework and more a few sticks crudely tied together, initially just as a teaching aid, that stripped everything back to the basics. It uses CSS as far as possible to deal with different screen sizes, but without the complexity of a full CSS framework. It uses a very simple SPA (Single Page Application) framework, but without the overhead of a toolset like jQuery Mobile or Angular. With a few lines of JavaScript and CSS and even less HTML, we can build reasonably sophisticated apps that work across mobile, tablets and desktop computers. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t be using the framework of your choice, but that by going through the exercise of building something simple you can get a fundamental understanding of what these third party libraries are doing.

Benefits of Attending this Session:

  1. Learn how responsive CSS frameworks like Bootstrap work, and the limitations
  2. Understand how SPA frameworks deliver an app-like mobile experience
  3. Make informed choices about frameworks and libraries when building your next application

 

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