There are so many JavaScript frameworks to choose from that it is sometimes difficult to choose one that will best fit your needs. Developers want to select the framework that will make their development easier, more maintainable, and work well with users.
In addition, I think developers want to pick the framework that will look best on their resume or impress their peers. After all, we want to be seen as working with the latest and greatest framework. With what seems like a steady stream of new one from the JavaScript framework firehose, you don’t want to go with one that might be out of favor in a month or two. Put all of this together and you might end up with analysis paralysis and never go beyond your comfort zone.
“The greatest fear in the world is of the opinions of others. And the moment you are unafraid of the crowd you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.” ― Osho
With that in mind, I found “The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Frameworks” to be an enlightening guide to help choose a JavaScript framework. I have worked with a couple of different frameworks and often wondered what the other frameworks did and why there are so many of them. This article will give you a quick introduction into the various frameworks so you can decide if one of them is a fit for your project. If nothing else, you will be educated enough to be able to contribute to a discussion a group of developers are having on which one is best.
You are probably familiar with the big three frameworks – React, Angular, and Vue. They are great frameworks and very popular. The chart below shows the downloads for these three frameworks in the past six months.
However, consider the framework Dojo for a moment. Yes, it’s just another framework, but it is unique in how it handles accessibility and internationalization. That might be something very useful for government, higher education, or enterprise application projects. It decouples the application from a particular or culture. Or maybe Inferno, which is designed to perform well on mobile devices. Currently, it’s server-side rendering is 5x faster than React, 3x faster than Angular 2, and 1.5x faster than Vue. Or maybe you need to build you own library to meet your needs. Then Picodom
is a library that can help with that.
The article reviews 54 different JavaScript frameworks. Just because “everyone” is using React, Angular, or some other popular framework doesn’t mean that you should too. Often a lesser used framework can make your development life a lot easier. This article is a great place to start looking at these other frameworks.