Exciting news this week as Office Dev center has released the first release candidate version for SharePoint Framework.
A Bit of Background
For those who haven't been following the development landscape for SharePoint and Office365 over the past year, the Office PnP team has introduced a new method for SharePoint development. Up until now, SharePoint 2013 focused on a new development methodology called "SharePoint Add-ins". These add-ins were a step in the right direction but not exactly what Developers were hoping for.
SharePoint Add-ins left alot to be desired. One of the biggest issues with the SharePoint add-in model in my opinion was the ability to build and style webparts. The Add-In model requires that the webparts are rendered inside of an Iframe. As a developer hoping to build responsive intranets from within SharePoint, it is extremely difficult to make a responsive Iframe. It can be done using HTML5 messaging to pass messages between the source and host of an Iframe, but it is too "hacky" for me.
Office Dev PnP introduced SharePoint Framework (SPFx) to us months ago in a developer preview. It has garnered a lot of excitement from within the development community and best of all, the SharePoint Framework allows us to build webparts using modern web technologies and without Iframes!
Other features of the SPFramework:
- Controls are responsive and mobile ready! (Ui-Fabric)
- Framework Agnostic - you can use React, Angular, Knockout,etc...
- Runs the current context of the user
- Faster than Add-ins because there are no iframes that need to be rendered
If you haven't had your hands on the new framework...click the link above and also checkout the GitHub page.
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