Introduction
We have done, a lot of coding on Server Side programming using .NET and other server-side technologies. Many systems were designed and developed in the server-side programming era. But today, I am sharing information about Client-Side SharePoint Development using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) development is a great milestone for SharePoint Client Side development. It is a page and web part model. This provides full support for client-side SharePoint development. It allows to easily integrating component with SharePoint data and supports for open source tooling.
With SharePoint Framework, you can use any of your preferred web technologies and tools in your preferred development environment. It is to build responsive and mobile-friendly SharePoint products and apps.
At Microsoft Ignite, the top discussed item was SharePoint Framework on Twitter among Microsoft Technologies at the event.
Background
SharePoint acts as an application or development platform for a long time and has become very popular. You will surprise because as per Microsoft, more than 200 thousand organizations have built their intranet on SharePoint. There is over 1 M active SharePoint developers helping their businesses.
SharePoint provided a lot of options to develop and customize from full-trust code execution on SharePoint Server itself, to Sandbox solutions, to Add-ins, to interface customization using CSS and JavaScript embedding.
Within a multi-tenant SharePoint Online environment, there is no support for full-trust code. Microsoft has depreciated Sandbox solutions. Add-ins or remote code execution (code getting executed somewhere else e.g. Azure) are the most common SharePoint Online development through standard API and JavaScript embedding.
It has made it difficult to keep up the evergreen model of SharePoint Online.
Objective
SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has the objective to solve all these issues using a standardized framework. It helps to build custom user interface extensions on top of SharePoint Online in a supportive and future prepared way as SharePoint Online keeps itself updated from time to time.
The SharePoint Framework was initially focusing only on client-side Web Parts which were already successful for the last 10+ years. But, the new model of SharePoint Framework is build up on the latest web technologies. It works well with new modern pages as well as in classical pages and SharePoint mobile apps.
SharePoint Framework comes with a new set of tooling which is based on cross-platform and open source technologies such as Node.js, Gulp, Webpack and Yeoman.
These frameworks are helpful at build time to streamline the developer experience for building, packaging, and deploying; but the actual execution of the SharePoint Framework code doesn’t have SharePoint Framework (SPFx) involvement.
Now, it has become feasible to work with SharePoint. It is very helpful for those developers as well who have never build SharePoint solutions previously.
Because of the above advantages, the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has become popular.
Thank you for reading.