Our three preferred JavaScript Frameworks

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language that supports event-driven, functional, and imperative (including object-oriented and prototype-based) programming styles. According to StackOverflow’s developer survey 2020, JavaScript is the most commonly used language for the 8th year in a row. Nearly 70% of people opt for it. The major reason for its popularity is the fact that JavaScript is versatile. Small or enterprise, front-end or backend, JS has been widely used for development for almost 2 decades as well as for testing websites or web applications.

JavaScript (JS) frameworks are one of the most preferred platforms to build a dynamic modern application, real-time chat, eCommerce, inventory, processing, and much more.

This article is not about which ones are the best, but which ones we used the most in our projects and business solutions in the past years. We aim to highlight the learning topics and technologies with the highest potential, benefits, and ROI.

What are JavaScript Frameworks?

A software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by additional user-written code. JavaScript framework is an application framework written in JavaScript where the programmers can manipulate the code to meet their unique requirements.

Frameworks are more adaptable for the designing of websites, and hence, most website developers prefer them. JavaScript frameworks are a type of tool that makes working with JavaScript easier and smoother. These frameworks also make it possible for the programmer to code the application as a device responsive. This responsiveness is yet another reason why the JavaScript frameworks are quite popular when it comes to the question of using a high-level machine language.

Its versatility favours both back-end and front-end development, in addition to testing them. As a result, you can find many JavaScript libraries and frameworks that serve various purposes.

What Are JavaScript Frameworks Used For?

• To build websites,
• Front-end, back-end and hybrid app development,
• Ecommerce applications,
• Build modular scripts, for example, Node.js,
• Update DOM manually,
• Automate repetitive tasks using templating and 2-way binding,
• Develop video games,
• Create image carousels,
• Test codes and debugging.

Sometimes it can be confusing when choosing the right fit for your project.

Don’t worry! Our team of experts has made a list of the top 3 JavaScript frameworks in this article, along with their features, benefits, and use cases. 

Our developers are specialized in several technology stacks, always keeping pace with the latest technologies. Throughout the years we’ve tested multiple frameworks to offer a wide range of solutions for your projects and put the right practices in motion to achieve exceptional results.

Let’s have a look at the three preferred JavaScript frameworks our team at Avangarde uses.

1. React

React.js (also known as ReactJS or React) is an open-source, front-end JavaScript library, used for developing UI applications. Created in 2013 by Jordan Walke, has been the fastest-growing JS framework in today’s world. React.js is most preferred when a high performing enterprise application needs to be delivered to its users. It is powered by user interfaces like Instagram and Facebook.

Features of React:

• React is declarative and component-based. The web pages are divided into small components to create UIs. The component feature comes in handy when it’s about maintaining code while working with large-scale projects.
• Due to this selective rendering, the app performance boosts while saving the developers’ efforts in recalculating the page layout, CSS styles, and full-page rendering.
• It supports JavaScript XML (JSX) that combines both JS and HTML. It helps in component rendering with nested elements, attributes, JS expressions, and conditional statements.
• One-way data-binding along with an application infrastructure called Flux controls. One-way data flow makes it easy to reason about an application, and Flux is a pattern that keeps data unidirectional.
• A React.JS based page consists of a virtual DOM. For every DOM object, there is a representation (copy) of that DOM object.
• Maintaining React is easy and straightforward due to its component-based architecture and reusability of the defined components.
• React can be used on the server-side as well as on the client-side, thus making it possible to distribute the rendering load from server to client if needed.

Use cases:

• Serving as the base while developing mobile or single-page applications.
• Rendering a state to the DOM and managing it.
• Building efficient user interfaces while developing web applications and interactive sites.
• Makes debugging and testing easier.

Cons of using React:

• It might present an additional learning barrier to developers that cannot catch up with new releases.
• React only deals with the View Layer of the MVC Model leaving out no other option but to rely on other technologies to deal with Model and Controller Layers.
• React is evolving and changing at a very fast pace, requiring developers to play catch up and reskill themselves. This can be exhausting and difficult to cope up with. Developers often find themselves stuck in a constant learning cycle which keeps rendering their previous knowledge useless or defunct.

2. Angular

Angular is an open-source typescript based framework by Google used to build client-side single-page web applications. Angular was created by engineers Misko Hevery and Adam Abrons in 2010. Today Angular is one of the most secure and popular front end JavaScript frameworks for developing dynamic single-page web applications (SPA) and enterprise-scale applications out of the box. The versatility of the framework is the key factor behind Angular’s success. More than a million websites are using Angular including Google, Forbes, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, Freelancer, LinkedIn, Lego, Hopscotch among others.

Features of Angular:

• The two-way data-binding of Angular manages the synchronization between the DOM and the model, and vice versa and saves developers from writing a lot of code
• Angular offers several built-in services. For eg. to render an XMLHttpRequests, it uses HTTP.
• In Angular, templates are the rendered view with information from the controller and model.
• Angular has built-in directives.
• Angular has a built-in dependency injection that lets the developer simply build, comprehend, and evaluate applications. This helps natural development, understanding, and testing.
• Directives – With this feature, it becomes easy to create custom HTML tags that act like new custom widgets. It can also be used to manipulate DOM attributes.
• Development is faster compared to conventional HTML+Javascript development if you have a good command over Angular.js.
• It can be configured in MVC as well as MVW architecture.
• Quick and easy to declare static documents.
• Impressive extensibility and customizability to work with.

Use cases:

• Developing e-commerce applications.
• Developing real-time data apps for weather updates.
• Example: YouTube PlayStation 3.

Cons of using Angular:

• Typescript – To use Angular you are obliged to use Typescript which does offer a lot of advantages but still poses a big learning challenge to new developers to surmount. Typescript is a big barrier to entry and explains why angular has struggled against both React and Vue.
• Heavy and Bloated – is extremely bulky and large, roughly close to 550-600kb which might not be suited for most of the small-scale applications.
• Poor SEO – Angular struggles with SEO due to acute accessibility issues cornered with search engine crawlers/spiders. 
• Difficult migration – Even though AngularJS (angular 1) is now obsolete, many applications are still running this legacy version. Migrating from Angular 1 to Angular(current version 10) is extremely painful and cumbersome. Angular is developing at such a rapid pace, migration among new Angular versions can also be challenging sometimes.

React or Angular? That is the question.

There has been a constant battle between choosing Angular and React. Let’s take a look at some pro arguments for each:

Pros of using React:

• Reusable components – React’s component-based approach helps developers to import or reuse UI components without breaking a sweat instead of coding them from scratch.
• Easy integration – React allows easy integration with other front-end and back-end framework like the popular PHP framework Laravel to work in tandem without a hitch.
• One Direction Data flow – One greatest fundamental difference between React and Angular 1 was that React was based on a downward one directional data flow architecture rather than a 2-way data binding adopted by Angular. This ensured that a child element cannot affect the parent making the code more stable and less prone to errors.
• Simpler syntax – React uses JSX JavaScript extension instead of usual JavaScript which is a HTML like syntax that makes the code easier to read, understand and maintain.
• Virtual DOM – React creates a virtual representation or a copy of DOM called Virtual DOM or vDOM. React compares the virtual DOM to the real DOM to only render components that have changed instead of rendering the whole page. This is the key behind React’s blazing fast performance.
• SEO – After many improvements, React is one of the most SEO friendly front-end frameworks that facilitates page crawling. Traditional JavaScript frameworks that rendered content dynamically were notorious for their poor SEO performance and incompatibility with search engine crawlers.
• Continuous Improvement – React is in a state of constant evolution and improvement adding key new features like Hooks, Fiber, Concurrent Mode, Suspense etc for reducing boilerplate code, improving concurrency and fast rendering and boosting performance making it a strong contender as the best front end JavaScript framework.
• Rich Community Support – React is backed by a massive Developer Community with almost 1.6k contributors on Github and a wide array of learning resources, tutorials and help guides readily available to anyone starting out. Also do not forget React is backed by one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world – Facebook.

Pros of using Angular:

• Component-Based Architecture – After ditching MVW(model-view-whatever) architecture, Angular 2 and beyond adopted a strictly component-based architecture that facilitates reusability. Components can be used over and over again throughout the app. It also enhances code readability and ease of maintenance.
• Server performance – Angular supports out of the box caching and tons of features to ensure fast server performance.
• MVC – Model View Controller in angular establishes key features like scopes and data binding. It also ensures UI and App logic are isolated from each other.
• 2-way data binding – One key feature of Angular is 2-way data binding which forms a link between the Model layer and View layer in such a way that each one of them reflects a change in another. However, other rival frameworks have adopted a one-way data-binding for simplicity.
• deal for building Enterprise scale web applications.
• Third-party integrations – Angular offers a rich collection of third party integrations to further enhance their web application.
• Massive Community Support – Angular is blessed with backing from Google and a huge developer community amassing over 1.1k contributors on GitHub. Angular also has great documentation coupled with a huge library of resources and community support.

In fewer words, React is easy to grasp, deploy, and start working with when compared to Angular, since developers will have to work with independent libraries with a comparatively better response time. React is excellent when it comes to handling small and stateless functions that receive input and return elements as their output. When there are multiple views for an application, ReactJS is our best choice, since for every view a different widget is needed. Angular is likely to become the main instrument to use for long-term and heavy investment projects where a steep learning curve is compensated for by stability and ongoing tech support. A lot of JavaScript developers are beginning their careers by working around Angular. The code is clean, comfortable to understand, and contains fewer errors due to controller and data-based rendering.

While Angular and React might cover any need your project might have, we’re also having Vue that provides higher customizability and hence is easier to learn than Angular or React. Further, Vue has an overlap with Angular and React with respect to their functionality like the use of components. Hence, the transition to Vue from either of the two is an easy option.

3. Vue.js

The 3rd place in our list of preferred JavaScript frameworks is Vue.js. was created in 2014 by Evan You while he worked for Google and is a lightweight progressive JS framework that gets a lot of its concepts from ReactJS and AngularJS. It has a template style similar to Angular and has component-based props just like ReactJS. Vue provides an easy and fast fix for applications, UI, and interactive web interface development. It can power advanced single-page web applications.

Features of Vue.js:

• Vue uses HTML based template syntax. 
• Vue allows the application of transition effects when items are inserted, removed, or updated from the DOM.
• Components extend the basic HTML elements to enclose reusable code.
• Vue has a robust reactivity system. 
• It has a tiny footprint.
• Detailed documentation, reusability, TypeScript support, and an easy learning curve. 
• High flexibility and simple to integrate.
• Suitable for all sized projects.
• Has a large ecosystem of plugins.

Use cases:

• Perfect to use in small projects that need lesser reactivity, display a modal, include a form using Ajax, etc.
• You can also use it on large single-page applications using its Vuex and Router components.
• To create events, binding classes, update element content, etc.

We can say that all the little ideas gathered from every JavaScript framework have been put into Vue to make it an all-rounder.

When it comes to web development, JavaScript continues to be the dominant language, and although there are several JavaScript frameworks to choose from, we chose the three above since they are the most talked-about and reliable among all JavaScript-based front-end development frameworks.

Our experience has taught us that there is no specific JavaScript framework that will fit everything. Each project is unique, and the choice of technology should rely on the client’s requirements. Each framework has its advantages and disadvantages, and we need to figure out which one has the features that fit best the project’s needs.

We carefully study the requirements before choosing the framework for your application.

If you are the one who is looking for the best framework for your next project, trust the choice of our professionals.

References:

• https://vuejs.org/
• https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020
• https://reactjs.org/
• https://angular.io/
• https://www.javascript.com/