A single-page application for managing vocabulary, written in vanilla JavaScript.
For quite a long time, I had been wanting to create a SPA (Single-Page Application) entirely in JavaScript to touch upon many diverse areas and APIs of the language, all at once, to ultimately improve my JS knowledge and skillset. Clearly knowing of the problems that I would've had to deal with in such an undertaking — the likes of routing, templating, server-side routing, as well as form validation, and much more — I decided to give it a try.
But with what project? That was the real question.
Well, I choose a vocabulary-manager application to keep track of some vocabulary words as I encountered them while reading books. And at this, I'd have to say that one of the best ideas that I've ever been able to come up with for a personal project would be this application. It has proven to be so useful that I still use it to date. I am a regular content writer and course creator, so knowing of nice vocab words is always paramount for me.
As you may know, all the heavy-lifting of a SPA happens on the frontend, hence it becomes an obvious fact to be utilizing JavaScript, in fact mostly JavaScript, for the application's codebase.
For styling and other user-interface concerns, I went with the plain, old vanilla CSS. I had already a lot to deal with on the logical side of the app, so I decided to stick to plain CSS for the time being, obviously allowing for the possibility of shifting towards a preprocessor in the future.
The backend is written entirely in PHP. Along with the basic PHP code, I've also built a simple .htaccess config file to route all incoming requests (to the server) to the single wireframe page of the SPA. Everything has been handcrafted at home — no third-party libraries for these basic tasks. 😊
The database technology is an RDBMS and one that is quite popular out there: PostgreSQL. This was my first time working with PostgreSQL and it does seem to me as an equally wonderful DBMS if I compare it with MySQL (another popular and mature RDBMS).