Any web designer worth his or her salt has spent a good amount of time mastering JavaScript. The programming language is a standard part of modern web development, thus one of the most updated tools on the market.
Choosing the right framework is crucial because it affects the speed and performance of an application significantly. In this blog, we list seven leading JavaScript frameworks and their crowning features.
1. Angular
Angular is a JavaScript framework written in TypeScript. It features a component-based framework, extensive TypeScript libraries, and handy developer tools to build, test, and update code. The logic behind this framework relies on fundamental concepts such as components, modules, templates, and data binding.
NgModules are at the heart of AngularJS. They’re compilations of related components and code that define the function of specific parts of an application. Similar to JavaScript modules, NgModules also lets you import and export functionalities from existing NgModules.
What’s great about Angular is its simple yet powerful syntax. It extends HTML to declare component functions and state changes easily. Moreover, data binding does away with manipulating HTML DOM, which is tedious and usually results in errors.
The framework is considered one of the most efficient and secure platforms to build scalable single-page applications.
2. React
React is a declarative JavaScript framework designed to build fast and interactive UI elements. It’s a popular choice when creating mobile and web applications. Like Angular, it uses components as its basic, reusable building blocks.
In React, components are split into two types: stateless functional components and stateful class components.
Stateless components are plain JavaScript functions that accept data and return them as HTML or React elements. In other words, they derive and display UI properties with no render method. In contrast, stateful class components require a render function and are used to maintain internal properties and states.
Separating concerns plus using unidirectional data flow are what make React easy to learn and manage. Changing a state in one component cannot affect the rest of the properties on the application.
Many developers use React with JSX (JavaScript Syntax Extension) to help visualize UI elements and simplify writing components.
React’s top use cases are illustrated by online platforms with highly dynamic components like Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and Airbnb. Seasoned web developers also use it to build custom extensions.
3. Ember
Ember is a frontend development framework that provides a complete package to create “ambitious” web applications. Ember uses two-way data binding thus enabling it to support complex user interfaces.
The framework is known for its CoC (convention over configuration) approach. Developers follow established conventions to maintain consistency and cohesiveness throughout their code. This, together with rich documentation and support, helps beginners learn the ropes of the framework.
Ember is characterized by its controller, view, and model layers which interact to build robust applications.
The model layer handles communication with the backend of your project. Meanwhile, the view layer works with the DOM to display elements on the screen. This is also the component that responds to user interactions like clicks, drags, and scrolls.
In between these two layers is the controller layer. Controllers receive data from a router and connect the view and model layers to switch between different states.
Use cases for Ember include building single-page applications and progressive web apps.
4. Vue
Vue is a progressive framework suitable for both desktop and mobile app development. The framework itself is only 18 KB, so it’s easily downloadable and installed with its full library. And as we all know, lightweight components mean positive effects for UX and SEO.
Vue utilizes virtual DOM. Instead of updating the entire model, Vue keeps a copy of HTML pages and their contents to render only the parts that have been manipulated. In turn, you hasten page rendering and improve application performance.
Its virtual DOM is coupled with reactive two-way data binding that immediately reflects tweaks in the model data onto the user interface. This method also helps to update related components and track changes hassle-free.
Vue marries the advantages of Angular and React. It’s good as an end-to-end framework like the former and has a view layer with state management as with the latter. Overall, Vue is also more straightforward and flexible.
Vue is the framework behind known brands like Adobe, Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Nintendo.
5. Svelte
Svelte is a novel component-based framework. Unlike traditional options like React or Vue, Svelte allows you to build components boilerplate-free using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It then uses a compiler to organize code into vanilla JavaScript modules before running the app.
The intermediate step results in fast, high-performing apps because the framework does not require high browser processing. Another point of difference is Svelte doesn’t use a virtual DOM. To render components quickly, the framework takes advantage of reactive programming to surgically update the DOM as you alter the code.
Svelte also eliminates client-side dependencies and complex state management libraries. With its set of advantages, Svelte is perfect for building interactive pages or apps with complex visualizations.
6. Meteor
Meteor is a full-stack JavaScript framework that offers real-time synchronization. It comes with a complete set of tools and technologies for developing modern web and mobile applications and is backed by a strong community of developers.
Meteor’s architecture relies on three main components: a command line tool, the view layer, and the atmosphere.
The command line tool is where you build and run your app while the view layer shows how the interface will appear to end-users. Meteor supports three UI rendering libraries, namely Angular, React, and Blaze.
The atmosphere refers to the collection of custom packages made by Meteor’s community. As of writing, there are over 13,000 packages designed specifically for the framework.
There’s only a small learning curve involved when working with Meteor. The framework allows you to write in a single language (JavaScript) for both the front- and backend of your app. Additionally, it provides clean and simple APIs and templates.
7. Node
Node is a server-side platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime. What’s special about Node is it uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model, which eliminates the waiting time between requests.
After receiving a task, the framework anticipates succeeding commands before returning content to the client. This chain of events is opposed to how PHP handles file requests where the system prepares for another task after serving content. Node is therefore very efficient since it works in quick succession.
The framework also boasts fast code execution and a single-threaded program capable of handling a large number of requests versus Apache and HTTP servers.
Node is the framework of choice for projects involving I/O bound applications, data streaming applications, data-intensive real-time applications, single-page applications, and more.
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