OK, I know a lot of folks are tired of me talking about it, but if you are interested only in UX functionality and not necessarily in learning the latest trendy tools, I have built a library that gives you a lot of what the other front-end libraries do at a fraction of the complexity:
Basically you use HTML attributes to drive AJAX requests, and render your HTML on the server side. (There are actually very good theoretical reasons for doing this[1][2].) It is built on top of jQuery and dovetails very nicely with it.
And, again, if you are looking for simplicity in front end development, while still building a modern web application, I think it's a good option. There is no tool chain beyond what you currently use for web development.
http://intercoolerjs.org
Basically you use HTML attributes to drive AJAX requests, and render your HTML on the server side. (There are actually very good theoretical reasons for doing this[1][2].) It is built on top of jQuery and dovetails very nicely with it.
There are lots of examples here:
http://intercoolerjs.org/examples/index.html
And, again, if you are looking for simplicity in front end development, while still building a modern web application, I think it's a good option. There is no tool chain beyond what you currently use for web development.
[1] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html
[2] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...