Top JavaScript Frameworks For Web Development in 2020

Kavindu S. Liyanage
Feb 20, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Apr 7, 2020

React

React is a JavaScript library that was originally created and was maintained, by Facebook. React is more like an open-source JavaScript library rather than a framework. It is mainly used for building stunning user interfaces with better rendering performance.

React has gained a good reputation within a short period. It was built with the aim of developing and operating the dynamic User Interface of the web pages. It gives the use of a virtual DOM and hence the integration of applications are more straightforward.

You will have to write less code with React and it even makes better due to the implementation of virtual DOM. This gives a huge weight on the scales when selecting it for a project. It provides React a sense of stability that more new frameworks lack. As ReactJS has just started its community is growing.

React is an effective framework and a tool for any large, comprehensive project and one of the most developer-friendly frameworks for 2020.

Angular

Launched in 2009 by Google, Angular is an open source client side web framework. It was developed for angular developers aiming at resolving issues in single page application(SPA) creation. It gels up well with all separate libraries and thus supports in extending HTML vocabulary for your web application. Angular development operates on features like routing, dependency injection, templates, data binding, directives, deep linking, and filters.

Angular is one of the most powerful, efficient, and open-source JavaScript framework that sits next to React at the top of the charts for JavaScript frameworks. Angular 2+ has had literally years of development behind it, and Angular.js was representative of a lot of lessons that helped the development of Angular 2 and future versions.

Angular today has become very high-level and modular to use for front-end development. Before you could insert a link to the AngularJS library in the main HTML file, but now you can do the same by installing different modules.

Angular 9 will indicate a turning point revealed by the Angular team at the novel AngularConnect 2019. According to the update, the team is planning to build the Angular lvy compiler available for all apps. The advantage of Angular Ivy is that it is able to decrease the size of web applications.

Angular's flexibility is commendable. That’s why Angular's 1.x versions are still in demand. However, various developers currently rely on Angular 2+ because of its MVC architecture which has improved substantially to a component based architecture.

Angular is a complete JavaScript framework with all the tools a modern front-end developer requires. You can select Angular if you don’t like to work with additional libraries as with React.

NodeJS

Built on Google Chrome V8 JavaScript Engine, NodeJS is a server-side JavaScript run-time environment, which works on cross platforms and is open-source. It comes with a callback concept to gain the all-new idea of event-driven single-threaded server programming. NodeJS is a JavaScript runtime that makes use of an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model thus making it lightweight and efficient.

NodeJS package ecosystem is the biggest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world, most of them hosted on the npm(Node Package Manager) website. It is officially supported on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Unix etc. The framework has the ability to of driving asynchronous I/O with its event-driven architecture. It runs in the JavaScript Runtime environment and hence shows related properties of JAVA like threading, packages, forming of loops.

NodeJS has a unique advantage because frontend developers that write JavaScript for the browser are now able to rewrite the server-side code in addition to the client-side code without the want to learn a completely various language.

Vue

Vue is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. It is the new rising star. Unlike different monolithic frameworks, Vue is created from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is targeted on the view layer only, and it is easy to choose and integrate with additional libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also completely capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

Vue was created and is maintained by Evan You and the rest of the active core team members coming from various companies such as Netlify and Netguru. The idea of Vue has been taken from React and Angular, but Vue is better in many ways.

With Vue, you save component logic and layouts along with stylesheets in one folder. This is the same behavior React runs, without stylesheets. To let components communicate with each other, Vue uses the props and state objects. This way also existed in React before Vue adopted it. Related to Angular, Vue needs you to mix HTML layouts with JavaScript.

One of the causes, why Vue is worth considering instead of React, is because of the Redux library that’s usually used in large-scale React applications. As described in the React section, when a React+Redux app grows bigger, you’ll waste a lot of time applying small modifications to many files instead of actually working on features. The Vuex library – a Flux-like state management tool created for Vue – looks less unwieldy than Redux.

If you're selecting between Vue and Angular, the causes to opt for Vue over Angular can be decreased to the following: Angular is an over-complicated, full-fledged framework with a restrictive nature; Vue is very simpler and less restrictive than Angular. An extra advantage of Vue over Angular and React is that you don’t have to study JavaScript once more.

Vue is extremely close in terms of its workflow to another framework. I might opt for Vue because it’s less complicated than React and Angular JS. On the other hand, Vue is a great choice for developing enterprise-level apps.