JavaScript is one of the most popular scripting languages ever developed, which supports object-oriented and prototype-based programming styles.
It is an amazing scripting language that not only handles client-side programming, it is also used to perform server-side functions as well. In simple terms, we can call JavaScript ‘The language of the Web World’.
JavaScript development services is massively popular amongst developers across the world and it holds the position of a Market Leader. As per W3techs.com a whopping 96.7 of all websites in the World, use JavaScript for their client end programming.
Stackoverflow conducted an annual Developer survey in 2022, where JavaScript emerged as the most famous programming language, for consecutive 8 years.
An overwhelming 67.7% of developers choose JavaScript and the biggest reason for its immense popularity is its versatile nature, as it offers a non-conventional ability to program both frontend and backend web components along with mobile applications testing as well.
Source: Stackoverflow
JavaScript enables developers to make not only dynamic web pages, it offers the ability to implement custom codes to make the web pages an interactive and immersive experience for the end-user. It offers the capability to use cross-platform runtime engines to write server-side programs.
It has a platform where developers can combine JavaScript with CSS3 and HTML5 to develop web pages that work on all the available browsers, different platforms, and a variety of mobile and non-mobile devices.
In layman terms, a framework is a structure underlying a software system, which provides the generic functionality, and on top of that it offers the flexibility to make changes by additional developer-written code, to address the end-users requirements and specifications.
If we talk about JavaScript Framework, then it’s a group of JavaScript Code Binaries, which provides Developers an ability to use pre-written JavaScript code to use usual programming features and functions, and on top of that, it helps developers to make custom changes in existing binaries to create powerful and highly dynamic frontend and backend web applications.
JavaScript Frameworks are highly adaptable for web development and mobile application development. JavaScript frameworks also enable the programmer to develop an application and make it responsive to the widest possible variety of devices, and this is the biggest reason of JavaScript Framework’s ever-increasing popularity among the Developer community.
In the past decade, we have seen the emergence of new Technology trends which led to the advent of multiple JavaScript Frameworks to address the programming requirements of these new trends.
We have seen that many new JavaScript frameworks entered the market with full galore but at the same time few frameworks were died a slow death due to their non-competitiveness.
We have several renowned JavaScript frameworks available and each one has its own pros and cons. Though we are in the opinion that it’s a slightly difficult decision to choose the right JavaScript framework for your organization to cater for the requirements of Business and Clients, however, we have tried to put the Top JavaScript Frameworks, which can be used for Frontend development, Backend development and even for Testing.
We will provide a brief introduction of these Frameworks, along with their functional advantages, and disadvantages from a developer’s perspective, which may help you to choose the right Framework.
It is one of the most popular open-source JavaScript libraries, which is used to create front-end user interfaces. Obviously, It is not a full-fledged framework like its rivals; however, it fulfils all the application development requirements.
It was developed by Facebook in 2011 and it became open source in 2013. Initially, it used to be known as “FaxJS” and Facebook implement it to rework its Newsfeed feature. React JS development is indeed the most prominent technology disruptor as far as web and mobile application development are concerned.
It introduced a functional and component-based programming method to create highly interactive and immersive user interfaces for small web page applications along with complex web and mobile applications.
React offers an amazing rendering capability by using ‘Virtual DOM’ which renders only active components, rather than rendering the entire webpage, in the process, it enhances the rendering speed manifold.
It also offers the usage of JSX syntax rather than using conventional JavaScript syntax, which provides the traditional JavaScript features along with additional capabilities of developing React ‘Elements’ which make a Developer’s wok quite easy, while working on App and Web interfaces.
It’s a pathbreaking element of React.js, which provides a non-conventional and highly effective way of updating the view in a web application. Whenever an underlying data changes, it creates a new Virtual DOM element of the user interface.
It’s a fact that rendering the Virtual DOM is always faster than rendering the user interface in the browser DOM, hence it increases the speed of rendering manifold.
It’s a markup HTML/XML type of syntax, which is indeed an extension of JavaScript and looks quite like the traditional HTML, which helps developers to program the React components quite easily. In other terms, we can say that JSX enables developers to put HTML into JavaScript, which was not possible otherwise.
It offers a Declarative approach, which makes code easily readable and quite easy to debug and re-process, which helps developers update and render the only necessary components whenever there is any change in the Data. React divides the entire webpage into several self-contained modules which are known as ‘Components’.
These components are used to define the Interactive and Visual elements of the end User interface. Its component-based mechanism helps Developers to create and manage the user interface in a better way.
React offers a fully-fledged W3C object model event system, which provides a cross-browser interface to an event, which enhances the handling of even for non-compatible events.
React events are named using the Camel Case, rather than the usual lowercase method. Developers can pass a function as an event handler rather than a String.
It offers Unidirectional directional data flow architecture which gives it an edge over Angular, which adopts a 2-directional data binding process.
This architecture offers the capability of making changes in the child elements without affecting the parent element. It makes the code less prone to error and enhances stability as well.
React is unarguably the most SEO-friendly framework currently available in the market. It enables developers to design web pages with better and high compatibility with the vast variety of search engine crawlers.
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Read Also: – React vs React Native: Which One to Choose and Why?
Vue JS Development is another open-source front-end JavaScript framework, which is extremely lightweight and used to design highly creative and interactive UI and high-performance web and mobile applications.
It was launched in 2014 and since then it has been immensely popular in the market for its amazing features and capabilities.
It provides the advantages of both Angular and React, where it is a full-fledged JavaScript framework like Angular, at the same time offers the capability to manage the view layer, just like React.
Vue.js is extremely simple as far as its design and Application Programming Interface is concerned. On top of that, it has a surprising small size (approx. 20 Kilobytes) which is lighter than all its rivals. It is so simple that a developer can build a simple web or mobile application in a few hours.
It has an out of box Model View and Controller design pattern, that helps developers to configure it quite easily unlike its rivals.
This feature of Vue helps Developers to assign values to web component attributes, assign classes, and change the style.
Vue offers multiple methods to apply CSS transitions to HTML elements. It also has the additional capability of implementing animations to several web components.
Vue.js offers HTML templates that help in binding the Document Object Model with the Vue.js instance data. It helps developers to use the template of the render functions to perform rendering functions.
Vue offers an extremely fast integration capability and it helps developers to integrate the newly developed web components into existing web applications without experiencing any integration issues.
Vue is extremely easy to learn for the developers, it doesn’t require learning JSX or Typescript, as in other rival Frameworks.
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Angular JS Development is another open-source framework developed by Google to program client-end web applications.
It was launched in 2010 and since then it has attained universal acclaim for its unbelievable functionality and features. However, due to the emergence of its rivals like React.js and Vue.js, Google has massively revamped it and launched Angular 1 in 2016.
It was transitioned to the component-based architecture from its earlier Model-View-Whatever architecture. The revamped Angular once again established itself as a strong contender in the JavaScript contender market.
Currently, it is considered as most robust and secure JavaScript framework used for designing enterprise level highly scalable applications.
Angular converts template into code directly, which makes it highly optimized for JavaScript virtual machines. It also offers native support to Out of The Box caching and several other optimization features that ensure blazing fast code execution and server performance.
Angular has the capability to load only that code to render which has been requested by the end-user. It implements automatic code-splitting, which ensures the quick loading of applications and web pages developed via Angular.
It has a massive collection of third party integration tools, which enhance the capability of an Application developer to integrate 3rd Party tools and features to improve the quality of an application.
This is one of the biggest advantages of Angular. It offers flexibility to use common Angular methods to develop Desktop applications across multiple platforms and it also has an unmatched ability to access native Operating System Application Programming Interfaces.
Angular supports the creation of high-performance, immersive transition effects and animation with very little code via its wonderful application programming interface.
This is one area where Angular frameworks are way ahead of their rivals. It enjoys massive support from Google along with a constant contribution from the global developer community.
Angular has unarguably the largest documentation along with a massive library containing a vast number of resources, which comes in handy to the Application Developers.
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Just like React, this is a library, instead of a full-fledged framework. As far as size is concerned, it is hardly 3kb in size, but it still offers its functions. It is also a product of Google, with the addition and removal of a few functionalities of React.
It offers a component-based mechanism along with Virtual Dom and at the same time, it is compatible with React. It can even use React packages without compromising on speed, performance, and leaner size.
In instances where the full potential of React isn’t necessary, most developers even use React during development and switch to Preact for production. Many major companies like Tencent, Uber, and Lyft are using Preact.
If it comes to Memory usage, then Preact wins hands down as it had optimized the functions in such a way that its garbage collector put less effort.
As discussed earlier, Preact uses the same ES6 API as React. This means the developers can easily switch to Preact from React in an existing project during production.
Preact.js has an ultra-small size of just 3kb and it has the unique distinction of being the smallest library or framework ever existed. However, when it comes to performance, it surprises with its unbelievable rendering abilities.
It offers a powerful command-line interface tool, which helps developers to create and manage projects without any hassles.
Preact has a distinct ability to optimize the state changes, which is known as the Link State module. It returns a handle function when passed in an event updates component state change automatically.
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It’s an open-source JavaScript framework, that is used to create single web page applications along with highly scalable enterprise-level applications.
It follows the philosophy of Model-View-View-Model architecture. Ember is equipped with a state of the art CLI tool, which is extremely powerful and offers additional capabilities to the developers.
Ember JS development is one of the matured and aged JavaScript frameworks if we compare it with its recent rivals. It enjoys loyal support from its developer communities.
It’s one of its own kind of command-line interface, which helps developers to create and manage the projects, creating several components and controllers using automation. It also offers support to install and integrate 3rd party dependencies.
It offers backward compatibility with the previous version, another big feature that helps developers a lot.
Ember offers one of the simplest mechanisms to work seamlessly with different application programming interfaces.
Ember works on the philosophy of “ Convention over Configuration”, which ensures that Developers do have not to think about any configuration in most cases, and they can work on coding and developing the web application.
It enjoy the availability of huge documentation and tutorials, which can help a novice to get started easily.
It is equipped with an Inspector tool extension for different browsers, which enables real-time monitoring and modification of applications.
Ember offers Bi-directional data binding.
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Express JS development is an open-source JavaScript backend framework that works with Node.js used for developing Application Programming Interfaces and web applications.
It is known as a de facto JavaScript framework for developing the back end of any Web and Mobile application.
It is an important constituent of MERN and MEAN stacks development. it’s the most popular Node framework on GitHub, which proves its credentials.
It has simplified and accelerated web application development using Node.js.
It offers end-to-end connectivity with all renowned databases like MySQL, Redis, or MongoDB.
It is in the market for almost 10 years and enjoys massive community support with thousands of contributors on GitHub.
Express JS development has a unique distinction of having wonderfully written documentation and other support resources.
Express offers the usage of multiple Middleware calls, which are used to execute code, making updates in objects or requests.
It offers a powerful routing mechanism, through which developers can define specific routes based on given URLs and HTTP functions.
Express enjoys a seamless integration capability with several template engines like EJS, HAML, and Pug.
It offers seamless backward compatibility with all the previous versions, which helps developers to work on all the versions without many challenges.
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It is an end-to-end server-end rendering framework that derives its origin from React. It is based on the philosophy of “Build once, runs everywhere”, which gives it an ability to develop universal applications, which can be operated on Mobile, Desktop, or on the Web. It also offers static generators.
It breaks down the application code into small bundles, which could be loaded separately based on the requirement, without loading the entire JavaScript code. This capability enables it to deliver faster results.
It’s a complementing feature of Code Splitting, as this allows the small JavaScript code bundles to be loaded in the background, which could be executed if the requirement arises.
Whenever Next.js detects any changes, it immediately reloads the page.
Next.js with its server-side rendering abilities offers a wonderful end-to-end SEO integration and performance. It allows creating the dynamic meta tags and putting them in the head section, which helps in SEO optimization.
It offers out-of-the-box Server-side-rendering, which helps it deliver blazing-fast performance, as it is independent of the client’s browser to load JavaScript to make content visible.
It starts rendering the HTML from the server, even before the availability of JavaScript code from the client’s browser.
Hence, we get the initial render results while the code is being loaded in the background, this offers a huge advantage to the developers.
This is an extremely handy feature, as it allows developers to build small static websites and huge enterprise-level applications at the same time.
It also supports the development of web applications, desktop apps, mobile apps, and progressive web applications too.
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It was launched in 2015, and it is not known for performing server-end rendering. It rather generates HTML based content at the client’s end, which helps in executing the code at a faster rate.
It also offers strong security features and seamless SEO performance. It comes with multiple plugins that help developers to add enhanced functionalities to the project.
It offers strong and implicit security features, that are independent of the server or database.
It offers an out of box support for Progressive Web applications, it can convert any website into a full-fledged Progressive Web App, which can provide an amazing experience to the end-user.
This is one of the most important features of Gatsby, it offers the capability to support multiple data sources like Drupal, Trello, WordPress, Netlify, Contentful, Stripe, etc.
It compiles and optimizes the code using the pre-fetching and lazy loading mechanism and, in the process, it ensures a high level of performance of the website and the applications.
Gatsby generates Static content, which is quite easily readable by most Search engine crawlers, it also offers no hindrance like its rivals, which makes it a highly SEO friendly framework.
Gatsby enjoys the availability of multiple plugins, which provide developers with an additional ability to use them to perform specific tasks like adding google analytics, Image optimization, caching, or even creating sitemaps. This feature makes the work of developers very easy and they can add functionalities without writing additional codes.
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Jest is considered as the best JavaScript testing framework ‘Stateofjs survey’. Facebook developed it and they have put more focus on making it simple and highly effective.
Developers use Jest along with Selenium to integrate JavaScript automated testing. It also offers strong cross-browser support for automated browser testing.
It assigns a unique global state for all the tests and thus it ensures running multiple tests in parallel. It always runs the previously failed tests first, which helps developers to mitigate any earlier errors.
It also offers the ability to re-organize runs based on the time taken by the test files. These features make it a fast and reliable testing framework.
Jest offers code coverage capability by adding a simple flag ‘Coverage’. For this, we don’t need any additional setup or configuration changes.
It helps Jest to collect code coverage information from entire projects, even from untested files. Isn’t this exciting?
Jest ensures the correctness of any JavaScript codebase. It also allows developers to write tests with easy-to-use and feature-rich Application programming interfaces, which returns the results so quickly.
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Mocha is another popular JavaScript testing framework, which runs on node.js and is known for its ability to perform asynchronous testing.
It offers a huge number of features to the developers and testers, it runs the tests in a serial fashion, and it returns accurate and flexible reporting to the end-user.
It supports both Mocha both Test-Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development environments for JavaScript automated testing.
Mocha JS could be installed in multiple ways per the project’s needs. It could be installed either locally or globally by running simple commands. Even at the Client’s end, Mocha can be installed by running specific commands.
It supports asynchronous testing and has features to make it easy to perform asynchronous testing for the code. Testers must invoke the callback once the test if completed, and synchronous testing could be enhanced by omitting the callback. It also offers the capability of writing asynchronous code using the async/await command.
Unlike its rivals, the Mocha supports both Mocha both Test-Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development environments.
This is the biggest strength of Mocha; it is highly compatible with all major web browsers. Hence, Testers can run Mocha on every web browser available in the market.
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As we have seen, there are multiple Frontend, Backend, and Testing JavaScript frameworks available in the market, every Framework has some distinct features which can cater to Application development requirements.
We hope this article will help you to have a better understanding of all the popular JavaScript Frameworks. We are in the opinion that we must assess and choose and integrate the suitable tools with your programs to increase efficiency, decrease cost, and save time and effort.
We must make the choice of an appropriate JavaScript framework based on the Organization and Project’s requirements, and we are hopeful that this article will help you make a wise decision.
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