Microsoft in recent years is continuously rolling out significant updates on its Office365 products and on the SPFX versions to develop them. With Microsoft’s modern SharePoint features like trimmed sites (team & communication), power apps, modern look, responsive UI and SPFx tools make SharePoint Online a favorite choice to create intranets and other portals.
SharePoint Framework adoption allows developers to be more creative and provides choices to do things faster and efficiently. The SPFx box brings in tools like Node.js, npm, Yeoman, and Gulp that allows open source developers create applications in SharePoint online. In addition to this, it allows users to leverage front-end development with a choice to use existing and proven JavaScript libraries in other environments.
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How SPFx evolved as a preferred choice over the traditional SharePoint codes?
Previous versions of SharePoint and traditional SharePoint pages and web parts were implemented using .Net for a long period. For a company like us that has been developing portals using SharePoint for a decade now know that Microsoft had kept a few things unresolved. The prime reason being support provided for both on-premise and online versions in Office-365, until Microsoft finally decided not to support On-premises beyond 2019. That said, the old approach had a lot sitting on the architecture that was supported by Microsoft stack and wasn’t ready enough for the present online mode. The approach to embrace solid cloud-based architecture of SPFx and power apps let go off of the existing Microsoft kit and has led to a paradigm shift in the way things will be designed and implemented in the future. This opens up a whole different level of opportunities for developing enterprise applications on the cloud with a variety of options to pick. This approach makes SharePoint Online a more open and connected platform that allows to choose the best and latest frameworks like Angular JS or React JS
The SPFx experience
One of the biggest advantages of SPFx is the modern SharePoint page experience that it offers – pages that can be technology independent and can be built using client-side Java scripting. Ability to create custom pages and web parts allow developers to leverage the capabilities of SharePoint even more efficiently and provide the better responsive and mobile-friendly design. These web parts are executed on the client-side and can work hand in hand with SharePoint and Office 365 tools. TypeScript is the primary language used for developing SharePoint Framework web parts and it plays a pivotal role. TypeScript acts like a wrapper to other JavaScript and cross communicates with other applications. JavaScript-based scripts are meant only for scripting purposes and not for creating applications. TypeScript allows classes, modules and other JavaScript language inside it as a subset and acts as a casing to make the code enterprise ready. Also, these applications developed in SharePoint Framework are free of Browser, IDE and Operating Systems.
IDE free
Visual Studio is not mandatory anymore to code SharePoint solutions but can take advantage of many open source technologies such as node.js, npm or Gulp in the framework. Developers can use any of their preferred code editor or IDE such as Visual studio or Sublime to develop SharePoint Framework. Since, developers are at the liberty to choose the code editor, open source frameworks and technologies, those who don’t have previous experience in working with the Microsoft ecosystem, can easily get up to speed and build SharePoint extensions.
AVASOFT SPFx and Modern Experience
AVASOFT, the SharePoint Intranet Portals are built using SPFx framework with Modern Experience. We also use power apps like Delve, Flow, and others to give a complete experience to the end users. Moreover, the user experience is enhanced by React.js web parts and the system uses a scalable architecture powered by TypeScript. We have been used to implement 45+ portals based on the SPFx model for a myriad of customers across the world.
