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Javascript Frameworks In 2016 by Olumyco(m): 9:07pm On Mar 17, 2016
JavaScript Frameworks in 2016
By Niall O'Brien
24 February 2016 in Tech

As JavaScript's popularity continues to grow and with it, the surrounding ecosystem of modern libraries & tools, it can
sometimes be hard to keep-up, leading to what some describe as
JavaScript Fatigue. This post will delve into some of the advances
we're seeing in the JavaScript community and how such solutions
may benefit you and your team, without making you fatigued.


FRONTEND

React.js
2015 was undoubtedly a big year for Facebook's React; with many
large companies adopting React (such as The New York Times,
Netflix, Airbnb, Instagram etc.) it's hard to ignore. So what makes
React a great choice for your front-end? For starters, React is
damn fast. This is achieved via a virtual DOM diff with the DOM
and batch updates to patch only the parts of the DOM that need
updating. React allows you to build small, reusable components
that encompass the template and the JavaScript logic behind
them. Of course, this requires the use of a build-tool such as
Webpack (and various other tools). It is this need of additional
tooling and the advances within this space that has a lot of
developers feeling overwhelmed.

React, being just the view layer, requires additional libraries which
you generally tend to piece together yourself, however, there are
many boilerplate projects available that have all of this ready to
go out of the box, the React Starter Kit being one of them.

The killer features of React are ‘universal rendering’ and ‘React
Native’.

‘Universal rendering’ means that our web application can be
rendered on the server and on the client, all from the same
codebase. This eliminates any SEO concerns typical of client-side
JavaScript apps without having to resort to solutions such as
PhantomJS or Prerender.io .

‘React Native’ allows you to target mobile platforms with a true
native app using JavaScript. Unlike hybrid mobile apps that
typically employ webviews within a native shell, React Native
compiles your app down to a true-native app for iOS & Android. If
you're already using React in your web-stack, employing React
Native to cater for mobile would make perfect sense.

Learning Resources: Web Bos has created a fantastic React
course called React For Beginners . Once complete,
Egghead.io offer videos on some more advanced techniques.


Angular 2.0
Google haven't had the easiest of paths upgrading Angular from
1.x to 2.0 and 2015 saw Angular's popularity decline. Some
members of the community weren't overly happy with the
direction Google were taking the framework as it's quite a
departure from Angular 1.x. This initial shock caused many to look
elsewhere. Also, the author of Durandal joined the Angular 2.0
team in 2014 only to resign a few months later to continue work
on Aurelia , the successor to Durandal. However, Angular is in
heavy use in many organisations and a lot of the design decisions
for Angular 2.0 were as a result of them listening to these users,
which is always to be encouraged
Angular 2.0 embraces ES2015, Typescript (which is optional) and
takes the component approach much like other frameworks
mentioned here. Angular drops many of the concepts introduced in
1.x (such as $scope) and simplifies many other elements, such as
directives. A big focus for the Angular team has also been mobile
performance, so it's no surprise to hear that The Ionic Framework
has committed to adopting Angular 2.0. We can also expect the
MEAN stack to upgrade once Angular 2 has been officially
released.

Overall, I think Angular will continue to get stronger and possibly
strengthen its place within the enterprise upon the release of 2.0.
Fullstack developers may also find it beneficial to build both their
web & mobile apps using the same frontend framework, possibly
increasing code-reuse due to the component nature of v2.0.

Learning Resources: Ng-Learn has a nice write-up on Angular 2.0.
If you're eager to get started with Angular 2.0 in the MEAN stack,
this tutorial is for you.


Vue.js
Vue.js is a front-end framework that's very easy to get started
with, yet under-the-hood lies a very powerful framework. For
starters, the documentation is fantastic and follows a natural
learning path. Vue.js takes the best parts of many other
frameworks and bundles them up into a cohesive, digestible
whole. Much like React, Vue.js advocates single-file components
and unidirectional communication between components to make it
easier to maintain application state (store pattern with immutable
state). Unlike React, Vue makes it much easier to get started
thanks to an official scaffolding tool - Vue-cli . We can even use
other preprocessor languages within our single-file Vue
components, such as Jade & Stylus. Unfortunately there's no
server-side rendering solution just yet, and while Vue performs
fantastic on mobile, it doesn't have a large team behind it like
Angular, Ionic or React do.

Learning Resources: The Vue.js documentation is the best place
to start. Jeffrey Way at Laracasts has created a great video series
called Learning Vue 1.0: Step by Step.


BACKEND

A backend JavaScript developer will be familiar with Express, Hapi
or Koa. These are all web servers upon which you can build your
applications; they're generally small and un-opinionated about how
your application should be structured. Additional functionality is
normally provided via NPM modules. However, towards the latter
part of 2015, we saw the rise of more full stack frameworks for
node.js.

This territory has normally been shunned by JavaScript developers
as many prefer to piece together their own stacks. That is still the
case for the majority of JavaScript developers and it's how we
prefer to do things here at Clock as it gives us the most control.
For the longest time the only viable fullstack framework was
Sails.js , closely modelled after Ruby on Rails. Sails is still a great
framework, but we now have some new contenders.


Trails
Let's begin with this framework as there has been a lot of Internet
Drama around Sails and Trails lately. Trails is the work of Travis
Webb and his team, spearheading a modular web framework that
allows you to swap out components (even the server). This
architecture also allows you to easily extend your app with
reusable trail-packs.
Travis was a core-contributor to the Sails.js project but was
removed by Mike McNeil, the BDFL of Sails. Both parties hadn't
managed to settle their dispute in private and it was instead
fought on Hacker News, in Github issues, on Twitter etc. Yikes.
Regardless, just to be clear, Trails is not a fork of Sails but is in
fact a complete re-write and takes full advantage of ES2015. v1.0
is scheduled for release in April, 2016 and from an initial look, it
should be very familiar to anyone who has used Sails in the past.


Nodal
Nodal is brought to us by Keith Horwood and aims to be an easy
to use framework for creating REST APIs. While this isn't as
fullstack as it initially claims to be (server-side rendering isn't a
priority) and it uses an unsupported templating language DoT.js ,
Keith's made some great progress allowing developers to create
REST APIs very easily, primarily through the use of code
generators.
Nodal is built from the ground up using ES2015. Keith was
unhappy with the lego-style approach to building web applications
with node.js and wanted something with a cohesive look and feel
across the stack that made him as productive as possible. It's
also worth mentioning that Nodal uses Postgres for data
persistence. Overall, this is a great framework with a very active
community.


Adonis
If you've ever used Laravel, a popular PHP web framework, then
you'll feel right at home with Adonis. Adonis embraces the
architecture & design patterns Laravel advocates and brings them
to node.js like no other full stack framework. Utilising ES2015
generators, proxies, Service Providers, Inversion of Control
containers and a powerful Active Record influenced ORM called
Lucid, Adonis certainly does bring a lot of functionality to the
table.
This framework favours SQL databases over NoSQL solutions,
something that's starting to become a lot more common now that
PostgreSQL has great JSON support.
While Adonis is very young, it has a lot of potential - especially for
attracting beginners as its documentation is quite thorough.
Experienced developers will also appreciate the architecture
choices Adonis has made with regards to building & maintaining
large applications.
This framework is best suited to those who are not just interested
in building stateless REST APIs (which it can do quite well), but
those who also wish to do server-side applications. Most
frameworks which focus on being a REST API back-end tend to
fall down in the server-side rendered department and Adonis
knows this.

Strapi
Strapi is a very interesting framework which focuses on the
construction of REST APIs. It's built on top of Koa and contains
many features out-of-the-box that a typical developer would need,
such as a user management system, JWT authentication, file
upload and email support and even supports GraphQL.
But what makes this framework particularly interesting are the
accompanying web apps; an admin dashboard that comes bundled
with your project and an online tool called Strapi Studio.
The admin dashboard allows you to manage the users and data
within your app, where as Strapi Studio allows you to build your
API via a web interface and the resulting code is synced down to
your computer - very cool stuff.
At the moment Strapi uses Waterline for its ORM, but is in the
process of switching to a SQL-only ORM, most likely Sequalize.
Keep an eye on this framework as it has a very passionate team
of Parisians behind it.

What do you think? What's your preferred stack?
Thanks.

2 Likes

Re: Javascript Frameworks In 2016 by timex4u(m): 11:00am On Mar 18, 2016
React.js seems more promising. wink
With Flux!
Re: Javascript Frameworks In 2016 by Nobody: 2:27pm On Mar 18, 2016
VueJS is lovely and minimal, Angular 2 am a bit worried about it, because it's going to be my companie's defacto FW, my fear is there are multiple ways to write Angular2 which is a great concern, some of my mates want JS , I want TS so imagine having the same Angular 2 but different approach, that's bad for convergence.
Re: Javascript Frameworks In 2016 by Olumyco(m): 5:15pm On Mar 18, 2016
pcguru1:
VueJS is lovely and minimal, Angular 2 am a bit worried about it, because it's going to be my companie's defacto FW, my fear is there are multiple ways to write Angular2 which is a great concern, some of my mates want JS , I want TS so imagine having the same Angular 2 but different approach, that's bad for convergence.

Google caused this. Probably Microsoft influenced them.
Re: Javascript Frameworks In 2016 by Urine: 5:24pm On Mar 18, 2016
pcguru1:
VueJS is lovely and minimal, Angular 2 am a bit worried about it, because it's going to be my companie's defacto FW, my fear is there are multiple ways to write Angular2 which is a great concern, some of my mates want JS , I want TS so imagine having the same Angular 2 but different approach, that's bad for convergence.

Interesting problem, I'm curious to know how this will be solved.
Re: Javascript Frameworks In 2016 by romme2u: 11:51pm On Mar 19, 2016
this is where u see gurus who knows what they are doing not some cut and join............ tongue tongue tongue

i have been following Backbone and Angular (frontend JS) as well as Symphony and Laravel (PHP) for sometime but i need them to be stable, well documented with a definite development path before committing to any of them.

For now messing with Drupal/Wordpress hooks(with their entire ecosystem) and client-side Javascript(with those shiny HTML 5 API's) grin grin grin

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