What is JavaScript?
JavaScript is a cross-platform programming language that allows you to work with frontend, backend, and mobile app development. It is considered to be one of the most popular and demanded programming languages worldwide. Today, almost no web page is complete without JavaScript-based interactive features.
What is a JS Framework?
JS frameworks are tools for building dynamic web, mobile, and desktop applications in the JavaScript language. With their help, you can develop full-fledged sites and functional modules alike. Full-fledged frameworks are much better suited for the first task, while for the second, it is recommended to use lighter weight frameworks or libraries.
The advantages of using JS Frameworks
From a large number of advantages, we can distinguish several key ones:
- Easy implementation of SPAs (Single Page Applications) and PWAs (Progressive Web Applications);
- Organized application structure;
- Shorter and cleaner code, which positively affects the speed of development, as well as the support and elimination of errors;
- App modularity, which makes it easier for several developers to work on the application simultaneously;
- The ability to quickly create a mobile and/or desktop cross-platform application from its web version using systems such as PhoneGap or Apache Cordova.
Angular
Angular is a framework from Google for building client applications. First of all, it is aimed at developing SPA solutions. In this regard, Angular came from Angular JS. At the same time, it’s not an update to its predecessor, but a fundamentally new framework.
Advantages:
- Thanks to the size of its community, there is a huge number of books, online resources, and conferences dedicated to Angular. This allows developers to stay relevant, and lets clients easily find companies to support their project.
- When creating templates in Angular, the declarative programming paradigm is applied, which makes the script more lightweight and easier to read and maintain. It happens due to the fact that the code describes the needed result instead of the steps required to accomplish it.
- A large number of useful features allows you to create the most user- and developer-friendly SPAs.
- Angular lets you organize applications from separate modules, which can be mutually dependant or autonomous.
- Angular modules are versatile and easy to manage. This modularization allows developers to load only the services they need at a given time, thus making automated testing more efficient. Plus, there is no need to remember the order of loading modules in case you adhere to the principle of “one file – one module”.
- Angular uses two-way binding: any changes in the user interface are immediately reflected in the application objects and vice versa. The framework itself monitors browser events, model changes, and user actions on the page to immediately update the necessary templates.
React
React is an open-source JavaScript library for developing user interfaces. It has been developed and maintained by Facebook, Instagram, and the community of individual developers and corporations. Its goal is to provide high speed, simplicity, and scalability. Moreover, React is often used in tandem with other libraries for developing user interfaces.
Advantages:
- You can always tell how your component will be rendered by merely looking at the source code. If you know the state, you know the result – no need to trace the progress of the program. This is especially helpful when developing a complex application as a team.
- Linking JavaScript and HTML in JSX makes the components easier to understand. Linking functionality directly to markup and packaging it into a portable, self-contained “component” will make your code significantly more effective.
- Client rendering is the reason why certain services are so slow. You can render React right on the server, which makes for far faster performance.
- Thanks to the support of Facebook, there is a huge amount of documentation and online resources on the network that can help you in learning and using React.
- A simple component model and server-side rendering functionality allow for a faster, more flexible approach to work while using smaller block sizes.
Vue
Vue is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike large monolithic frameworks, Vue is perfectly suitable for gradual implementation. Its core primarily solves the problems of the presentation level, which simplifies integration with other libraries and existing projects. What’s more, Vue is great for building complex single-page applications when it is used in conjunction with modern tools and additional libraries.
Advantages:
- Vue.js allows for a fast transition from other frameworks such as Angular and React, due to their similarities in terms of design and architecture.
- Reinforced HTML means that Vue.js has a lot in common with Angular. This can help you optimize HTML block processing using different components.
- Vue.js helps develop fairly large reusable templates in no time, thanks to the simple structure of the framework.
- Vue.js has a lot of quality documentation that can increase the learning speed for programmers and save a lot of development time for those with basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript.
- Vue.js can be conveniently used both for building single-page applications and for progressive web application interfaces. Most importantly, small interactive features can be easily integrated into existing infrastructures without negatively impacting the entire system.
Meteor
In essence, Meteor is a platform for building highly interactive modular client-server applications. This full-stack platform is designed for real-time web application development that enables seamless communication between frontend and backend. The DDP protocol supported by WebSockets or AJAX is used to communicate with most modern browsers.
Advantages:
- Meteor provides its own frontend framework called Blaze. It takes care of binding all the important data, from your collections to your views. Because of this, you don’t have to worry about issuing manual updates – they’re all done automatically.
- When you write the logic in one language, the result performs smoothly on all platforms: servers, browsers, Cordova (Android, IOS).
- The Meteor project management team consists of smart and experienced developers who understand the value of their community: they hold monthly events, issue support via StackOverflow, provide up-to-date API descriptions, and more.
- Built-in Fibers provide convenient asynchronous server-side programming. When working with Meteor, you generally write ordinary synchronous code, which then works asynchronously, since each call to the server method works in its own Fiber and does not affect the work of other calls. This greatly simplifies the structure of the script overall.
- Convenient application deployment. If you are just starting your project, then using one command from the console is enough to publish it on the .meteor.com domain. After deployment, you can reconfigure it to your_domain.com. If the project has grown and needs to be transferred to professional hosting, then the product is easily assembled into a node.js application with its only dependency being npm.
Aurelia
Aurelia is an open-source frontend framework that consists of function-oriented modules such as plugins, routing, testing, dependency injection, and more. The environment can be used to develop web applications and applications for mobile devices.
Advantages:
- According to its creators, Aurelia offers a component-based model that meets all the best web development standards. It takes advantage of many new ECMAScript features and encourages you to use them in code writing. This is a good thing because that way you’re learning new syntax that also works outside of Aurelia.
- At the heart of Aurelia is an excellent, responsive structure suitable for grouping various DOM updates.
- Using generic routines, Aurelia takes the most efficient approach to tracking every property in your model and seamlessly synchronizes the UI and your current state.
- Aurelia is one of the cleanest modern frameworks that is completely focused on meeting contemporary web standards without any unnecessary distractions.
- Aurelia has adaptive data binding, meaning it can use one-way data binding as well as two-way one, while Angular can suggest only two-way data-binding.
Svelte
Svelte.js is a modern open-source JavaScript framework that allows you to write easy-to-understand JavaScript code that is then compiled into a highly efficient program reactively running in the browser.
Advantages:
- Svelte is a component framework designed to compile components at build time. With this approach, you can load just one bundle.js per page to render the entire application. This makes the web solution quicker and the coding process – easier.
- Svelte renders the DOM using reactive programming, which is, in general, much faster than the Virtual DOM. As a result, Svelte provides one of the quickest renderings from any framework.
- Svelte is beginner-friendly. There is no need to manipulate the DOM when you use it. You also don’t need to comprehend framework-specific state wrappers. Variables can be accessed directly from markup, and this greatly simplifies the process of creating a new application. With Svelte, programmers can learn the basics of the component’s state work without getting lost in all the intricacies that tend to plague similar frameworks. Some technicians presume that Svelte allows writing less code. Because code is terse there is less boilerplate, which leads to having less bugs.
- Svelte is open-source software developed by enthusiasts. Thus, using the Svelte framework is not costly and allows you to implement many features for free. Also, Svelte has an active developer community on GitHub that you can join and where you can always ask for help or contribute to this technology.
- It’s a compile-time framework and doesn’t require any framework-specific runtime. It has the smallest package size of any framework.
Express
Express is a popular JavaScript web framework that runs inside the node.js runtime environment and is designed for building web applications and APIs. It’s a de facto choice for Node.js.
Advantages:
- There is a large number of detailed instructions and descriptions available online, compiled by developers to test its effectiveness in practice. This makes the framework accessible to skilled programmers and beginners alike.
- The framework is easily integrated with a huge number of modules, which allows you to customize it as much as possible to meet the needs of the app at hand.
- One of the easiest and popular frameworks, used on the platform of Node.js.
- The framework integrates with all the most popular DBMSs: MongoDB, MySQL, and others.
- All popular template engines such as Pug, HAML, and EJS are compatible with Express.js.
Conclusion
Choosing the perfect framework for developing your software from the wide range provided by JavaScript is a daunting task. With the passage of time and constantly changing customer needs, new frameworks will keep popping up on the dev market. And they will absolutely have more interesting features to meet those growing demands. So, developers really ought to keep track of these updates. Still, the most appropriate decision would be to entrust the matter to coding professionals, who are all well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of every framework and can, therefore, orchestrate them in a way that guarantees an effective solution.
Bamboo Agile is a team of professionals that develops web applications on the most popular and demanded JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as Angular, React, Vue, Express, and others. When you’re in need of help with your web development, leave your contacts in the form below – we will come back to you to discuss your custom software project!
