With new JavaScript frameworks and libraries coming constantly on the market, designing your application Front-End it’s quite tricky.
In the last years, jQuery was the most known and used JavaScript library.
The latest survey by Stack Overflow(2019) confirms that jQuery is the most broadly used library for web development:
- jQuery – 48.3%
- Angular/Angular.js – 32.4%
- React.js – 32.3%
- Vue.js – 15.5%
- Laravel – 10.4%
- Drupal – 3.5%
- …
Although jQuery is still in use on a big number of applications, this trend is declining, making more space for new frameworks and libraries like: Angular, React, Vue.js, Ember.js, Backbone.js, etc., which help us to build dynamic modern applications.
Therefore choosing the best technology that meets your application needs it’s not easy but will definitely make the development process easier and more efficient.
⦁ Angular
Angular is a Typescript – based framework, widely used by Google, Forbes and WhatsApp for developing highly interactive web applications.
Development :
Angular ensures an easy development process having a component-based architecture that provides a higher quality of the code.
Features like templates, two-way data binding, modularization, API handling, dependency injection, etc. ; make this framework a good choice for enterprise applications, ensuring readability, reusability and speeding up the development process.
In terms of performance, once the project gets more complex and dynamic, you can end up with a heavier and slower application if you are not aware of how to develop performant Angular apps. Also, Angular uses a regular DOM, meaning that it will update the entire tree structure of HTML tags, thus, minimizing the performance.
Angular is easy to step up but sometimes it uses a lot of unnecessary syntax for some simple things increasing the coding time and delaying project deliveries.
Testing :
The component-based structure of Angular makes unit testing much easier.
With Jasmine: the most popular JavaScript testing framework and Karma task runner, you can write your tests easily, quickly and effectively.
Maintenance :
Decoupled components are quite easy to maintain and replace with better implementations if needed, enabling efficient code maintenance and update.
Angular has one of the best documentation and also one of the most helpful communities out there, making easy to find a response to most of the questions you may have.
⦁ React
React is a JavaScript library for building UI components , widely used by Facebook, Uber, PayPal, Netflix, Udemy etc.
Development :
React takes longer to set up than Angular but after that lets you create projects and build apps relatively quickly. Compared with Angular which requires a good knowledge of TypeScript, React is much easier to learn and understand if you already know JavaScript.
React is very fast because it uses a virtual DOM that only looks at the differences between the previous and current HTML and changes the part that is required to be updated and not the entire tree structure of HTML tags.
Since the data-binding process is unidirectional, first, the model state is updated and then it renders the change in the UI element, avoiding additional workload.
Testing :
Jest is a JavaScript Testing Framework commonly used for testing the React code. It is included in every React project and requires zero configuration to use.
Also, Enzyme testing utility adds up perfectly to Jest, making easier to cover your application with unit and integration tests.
Maintenance :
With large scale React projects and complex UIs, you can face a lot of challenges but as long as you’ll keep the components small, reuse instead of duplicate, have a good coding style and cover your application with tests, the maintenance wont cause you a lot of troubles.
The community supporting and developing React applications it’s huge, thus it will not be difficult to find a solution to your possible problems.
⦁ Vue.js
Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework for building user interfaces, widely used by Xiaomi and Alibaba.
Development :
One of the greatest advantages of Vue.js is its small size, which can also positively impact your User Expirience and SEO.
In terms of speed, Vue.js it seems to be more performant than Angular and React , facilitating two-way data binding, utilizing a virtual DOM and rendering the page quickly, thus improving application performance .
It is quite easy to learn and understand this framework and can be also easily integrated with other libraries or existing projects.
Testing :
Vue.js Test Utils is the official unit testing library for Vue.js framework, having a lot of good methods to help you cover your application with tests.
Vue CLI has also built-in options for unit testing with Jest or Mocha that works out of the box.
Maintenance :
The Component Based Architecture brings a lot of benefits: Component reusability, Code readability and easy unit-testing making the maintenance process easier.
The Vue.js documentation is so comprehensive and well-structured that any one who knows JavaScript and HTML can develop his own application relatively quickly.
Conclusion :
At this point, You’ve probably understood that it`s quite difficult to divide all these frameworks and libraries into “What is better and Why”, as long as the choice depends only on the requirements and the resources you have for your project.
Of course this article is just an overview on a few features that these frameworks and libraries provide us to simplify the Development, Testing and Maintenance process.
But you may definitely want to dive deeper into their PROS and CONS in order to make the right decision for your next application.
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