Top 8 JavaScript Frameworks – Choose as per your Need!

Earlier in our previous tutorial, you learned about JavaScript Libraries. Moving ahead, today we will learn about JavaScript Framework. With the passing years, there have been many JavaScript frameworks innovated and picking one amongst them can be a difficult task. If you’re dazed and you don’t know which one to pick or which is the right one for you, don’t worry, you came to the right place. This tutorial will cover everything about the Frameworks and help you to decide which one to use.

But the very first question that arises is – What exactly a framework is?

JavaScript Framework

We can easily understand a framework with the example of a collage maker. These applications have some photo frame ideas that you can choose from. You just have to sit and decide which frame you like the most. You don’t have to position them all by yourself which provides faster results. But they have limited choices to select from.

So a JavaScript Framework is an application skeleton, a complete structure that provides the programmer with the basic tools of creating a website or a web application. They consist of a huge collection of various JavaScript libraries that supplies the programmers with pre-written code and thus allows even those who don’t have a lot of programming knowledge.

It is important to remember that though you can extend the framework’s functionality by adding your code, you should not modify the framework code. These provide a flexible way for programmers to create websites and the facility to add their code when needed. But you can’t control the whole structure of the website.

Similar to libraries, these frameworks also have documentation available on their official sites.

Now let’s go through the topmost JavaScript frameworks available discussed below –

1. Angular

Angular is one of the top considerations while choosing the right JavaScript framework. It is also the most common framework used to work with JavaScript. It definitely has a lot of perks for your web development. Some of them are:

• It supports caching and many other processes, reducing the network traffic as well as the burden on the server.
• It is a lot faster as compared to other methods of creating a web application. With less code, you can develop better applications and add various features without getting annoyed.
• It serves the developer’s need for cross-platform web development.
• Directives allow the developers to easily manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM), creating rich and dynamic content with HTML.
• Since Angular was developed with Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, it synchronizes the View and the Model. The programmer need not interfere to synchronize them, reducing the development time. We refer to this as ‘data binding’.
• Angular is very popular in terms of speed and performance and makes way for super-fast development.

Even with all these features, Angular still has some issues:

• Due to the limited documentation, it is a bit difficult to adapt. But the communities are a great help, making it much easier.
• It may make the rendering of websites slow in older browsers because they will be overloaded with other tasks like DOM manipulation.
• If a developer follows the traditional approach and is unfamiliar with MVC architecture, then this framework will be extremely time-consuming.
• JavaScript support is mandatory or the users with JavaScript disabled couldn’t access your websites or web applications.

2. Ember.js

Ember.js is a free, open-source, client-side framework, used to develop web applications. It was originally called the SproutCore MVC framework. It’s a great choice when you want to build a large-scale project with lots of functionalities.

• Relatively popular and thus provides a lot of community models to work with if you have any trouble with your code.
• Supports data binding, making it more time-efficient.
• Works with jQuery, thus we can use any of its features in the framework.
• It has its debugging tool called Ember Inspector to debug client-side applications.
• Allows custom properties in a template, thus we can rendering the page as per requirement. You can add any function as a property and call it from the template.
• It is continually evolving, thus filling up the gaps rather easily.

Don’t forget to explore JavaScript Objects.

Along with all these pros, before you start using Ember, you must know the below cons:

• A difficult framework to understand for beginners, thus it has a rather steep learning curve.
• Relies more on Ruby on Rails rather than on JavaScript thus having a lot of overhead.
• One of the largest JavaScript frameworks, thus it is useless for small and simple projects.
• Due to the helper function, two-way binding is more complex.

3. Vue.js

Vue.js is a versatile open-source JavaScript framework designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. We often mention it along with Angular and React.js since it is very similar to React.js. Despite being relatively new in the market, it is gaining popularity day by day. Developers all around the globe are having a great experience with this framework. This is because of the following reasons:

• Compact and is very fast, thus providing one of the best speed parameters available.
• Extensive and detailed documentation that allows beginners to adapt to the framework very easily.
• Perfect for SPAs and handles data binding very efficiently. It simplifies two-way reactive data binding between HTML and JavaScript.
• It has TypeScript support and every update add new features to work with.
• Really flexible; you can easily design any web applications you need.

4. Backbone.js

Backbone.js represents the data as Models and provides various tools for a more structured approach in client-side development. It belongs to MVC type libraries. MVC (Model-View-Controller) is a pattern to create applications. Backbone.js uses Models, Collections (set of models), Views, and Routers. The various advantages Backbone.js offers are:

• Open-source, thus any developer can use it for development.
• Compact library, with all significant components for development.
• Easy to extend it with other libraries and tools.
• A fast, easy and lightweight framework to work with.
• It provides the developer with a lot of control over performance, especially in mobile applications.

The pitfalls of Backbone.js includes:

• The free choice of tools for extensions can be a little difficult for a beginner to understand.
• It only provides the tools to create the structure, not the complete structure. Thus it is up to the developer to decide the application structure.
• Despite using MVC architecture, it doesn’t support two-way data binding, increasing the complexity.

5. React Native

React Native JavaScript framework inherits all the main features of the ReactJS library, like code reusability. You already know all the features of ReactJS from our prior tutorial on JavaScript Libraries. Many popular applications like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Skype, etc. use React Native for development. The benefits of using React Native are:

• It is an open-source project, thus increasing its community support daily.
• It provides various ready-to-develop components, thus it has a shorter development time.
• Cross-platform applications are possible to some extent as it supports iOS and Android.
• It creates fast, stable and reliable applications very easily.
• It saves the developers time as well as money with only a minimum code.

The pitfalls of the framework are:

• There is only a small collection for the readymade components, limiting the developers to only simple applications.
• Its testing is still in the beta phase since the navigation is not so smooth.
• Implementing all the features and modules requires native developers, that we are lacking for now.
• It has a steep learning curve.

6. Three.js

Three.js is a great framework to create and display 3D computer graphics- models, games, music videos, scientific and data visualizations in a browser or a smartphone. It is very handy for creating amazing websites with the least code. The strengths of this framework are:

• It supports various features like effects, animation, utility, examples, etc.
• It provides detailed documentation, reducing the developers’ load if they have trouble with the code.
• The team fixes bug and adds new features regularly.
• It is very easy to create game-quality 3D graphics with this framework.
• It supports most of the industry-standard file formats like obj, mtl, fbx, 3ds, gltf, collada, babylon, etc.

This framework has the following drawbacks:

• It is in its early development stage, leading to a lack of documentation and informative references.
• Since it is constantly updated, a lot of third-party help available is outdated.
• Even though it has its editor, it is still in the development stage. It is unable to support a lot of engine features.

Did you check our most leading blog on JavaScript Functions?

7. Aurelia

Aurelia is a modern front-end framework functions as a platform for building browsers, desktop, and mobile applications. It is open-source and built on open web standards. This is the latest version of JavaScript and can extend the HTML for various purposes like data binding. This ensures the interpretation of both client-side and server-side at the same time. Some advantages of using this framework include:

• Rendering of this framework is very fast, with a simple and powerful code.
• Since it always tries to stay within the existing and emerging Web Standards, it is very easy to learn for new developers to follow best practices.
• Most of the code written is Aurelia-agnostic. This allows the testing of code, switching it to another implementation and make even HTML code look business-oriented.
• Full built-in TypeScript support. It also has commercial support as an official product of Durandal Inc.
• Supports interoperability; we can use it with other frameworks like React because they are based on WebComponents standards.

The issues that the developers need to remember before choosing this framework are:

• Since it is very new in the market, it has a very small following and community support.
• It doesn’t have any notable big web products under its belt yet.
• Lack of enough training resources for this framework limits self-paced learning unlike for others like React, Angular, etc who have great tutorials for beginners.

8. Meteor

Meteor (Meteor.js or MeteorJS) is a full-stack framework that helps programmers to write the whole applications in JavaScript. It applies Node.js in the back-end and MongoDB for the database. It is an MVC framework that speeds up the development of Android, iOS, and web apps. The advantages of this framework are:

• It is a very good option for a beginner since it has very detailed documentation.
• The abundance of packages and libraries available make it highly-sought by the programmers in the web market.
• Open-source and free with large community support.
• Integrates with React, Angular, and Node.js (frameworks), Apache Cordova (command-line interface) and MongoDB (a database).
• Provides easy and simple hosting and deployment.

Loopholes of this framework are:

• It only syncs with MongoDB and doesn’t provide any SQL support for your website.
• It requires a strong internet connection to synchronize between frontend and backend sides.
• Since Meteor is full-stack, it is very difficult to integrate with existing projects.

Summary

Here we come to the end of our tutorial on JavaScript Frameworks. These JavaScript Frameworks play an important role in web development. Thus it is essential that you have at least a basic idea about these frameworks. In this article, we had a deep observation of the top 8 frameworks in JavaScript. You must weigh all the pros and cons before selecting a framework to work with. The framework you choose must meet all your requirements. Meanwhile, you may go through our next blog on JavaScript Syntax.

Hope the information provided was useful to you, drop your feedback and queries in the comment box below.