This article is for staff, students, and faculty interested in learning more about web and cloud application development for work, school, or personal and professional growth.
Front-end development at St. Thomas involves working across several frameworks and vendor platforms, with Vue.js, React.js, and Angular being the most commonly used, depending on the system. When starting new projects, developers should choose the framework that best meets the long-term needs of maintainability, accessibility, security, and sustainability. By using modern build tools, maintaining version control, keeping packages up to date, and following standardized practices, developers create solutions that are easier to support, extend, and deploy in partnership with the Enterprise Application and Cloud Development team.
Learn the Basics
As you begin to develop front-end services at St. Thomas, it is essential to understand the basics of accessibility, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Many content management platforms, such as Canvas, LibGuides, OST pages, and WordPress, offer a limited set of options when creating content, often just a Rich Text or source view with some basic HTML and CSS. If you do find yourself in the View Source area of a content management system, ensure that you are using semantic HTML and not overriding CSS that could cause your content to become inaccessible, hard to maintain, or unreliable in various browsers.
Learning Vanilla JavaScript and coding best practices goes a long way. It helps you understand frameworks, port methods and code to other frameworks, write efficient and reliable code, and ensure your code lasts for a long time.
Vendor Platform Development
Many of our public-facing and internal systems operate within vendor-specific platforms that provide their own development patterns, SDKs (software development kits), and integration points. As a result, the university's front-end ecosystem includes Vue.js, React.js, and Angular, depending on the system in use. For example, the stthomas.edu website (Cascade platform) is built using Vue.js, One St. Thomas (Unily platform) uses Angular, and Murphy (Ellucian Experience platform) uses React.js. These platforms shape how features are developed, tested, and deployed.
When developing inside a vendor platform such as Ellucian or Unily, review their SDKs or integration toolkits and use the latest supported versions. These vendor-provided resources help ensure that components behave correctly within their environment. Ensure you apply best practices in developing and maintaining customizations and avoid over-customizing or relying on features (or changing features) that may break during a vendor upgrade. When possible, set up automated deployment procedures so updates can be delivered reliably without manual steps that introduce risk.
If you are considering a vendor platform and custom UI development is important to you, make sure you involve the development team (typically part of TIP (Technology Intake Process)). Features to evaluate include accessibility, the SDK, frameworks (and frequency of framework version updates), local development requirements, code versioning, Git integration, and deployment methods.
From Scratch Considerations
When you begin a project outside a vendor ecosystem, you have a lot of freedom in choosing tools. Selecting the proper framework is an important early decision. React.js and Vue.js are the two most common choices at St. Thomas, and both offer strong community support and modern tooling. The best framework for your project should align with long-term maintainability, extensibility, accessibility, and security. A sustainable approach includes choosing well-documented design patterns, avoiding tightly coupled or overly complex custom code, and ensuring that your structure can be supported by others after you graduate or move into another role.
Most modern frameworks rely on build tools such as Vite or Webpack to bundle assets, run development servers locally, and prepare code for production. We recommend using current, supported versions of these tools to ensure compatibility and performance. All projects should be stored in a Git repository so changes can be tracked, reviewed, and deployed consistently. Maintaining package dependencies is equally important. Packages should be updated regularly to stay compatible with your framework, reduce security risks, and avoid issues during future upgrades.
Learn More
The Developer and Cloud Tools service page provides an exhaustive list of developer tools to help you get started. As you explore and discover opportunities to innovate within your area, feel free to reach out with any questions you may have using the Developer and Cloud Tools Request Service form.
The Enterprise Application and Cloud Development team is available to help you establish version control, implement deployment pipelines, and follow essential practices that support sustainability and long-term success. By beginning with the right tools, frameworks, and structure, you create front-end applications that are easier to maintain, extend, and support throughout their lifecycle.