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Although typical application scenarios for Web development are rarely active in other business domains than servers as platforms and browsers as clients, there is no denying that the use of JavaScript languages and frameworks has become mainstream. Angular, React, and Vue, the three frameworks for JavaScript, have matured, and their differences are becoming more and more obvious. If JavaScript will continue to be popular for another decade or so, what will you do in the next decade?
Angular
AngularJS has been around for 10 years since its inception in 2009. In just ten years, it has had a profound impact on the development of the Web community. As an excellent JavaScript framework, it has attracted a lot of attention around the world since its launch a year ago, and is now successfully used in more than 600 Google products, such as Firebase console, Google Analytics, Google Express, Google Cloud, etc.
AngularJS has many core features, including MVC (Model — View — Controller), modularity, automated two-way data binding, semantic tags, dependency injection, and more. Angular’s latest release, 7.0.0, was released in October 2018, and the next version is expected in the second quarter of this year. Here are Angular 7 optimizations for performance, command-line tools, and Material Design components:
Performance: Angular 7’s new virtual scrolling optimizes the presentation of a single page, which is especially useful for ClickBait sites that keep visitors scrolling down. Another performance highlight of Angular 7 is called Bundle support, which is used to alert developers about the size of JavaScript packages currently used, starting with JavaScript packages that exceed 2MB and breaking generation when they reach 5MB.
(Angular 7 Virtual scrolling)
Command line prompt: Angular 7 prompts users to find built-in features like routing or SCSS support when typing commands like ng new or ng add \@angular/material on the CLI, simplifying the coding experience and helping developers discover new features or provide inspiration.
Visual style: Google updated Material. IO in 2018 before Angular 7, with subtle visual differences: for example, bolder UI structure levels, more rounded corners of shapes, five new Icon styles, and a very modern drag-and-drop module.
Angular 7 drag and drop effects
React
Angular’s emergence caused a stir in the Web community. Two years later, Facebook introduced React, an equally rich library of JavaScript UI components.
Using React means you’ll start front-end development in a much more minimalist way, which is what most developers expect:
- No dependency injection
- Create a virtual DOM using JSX, an XML-like language built on JavaScript, instead of a classic template
- Use state management setState and Context APIS
- XSS protection
- A utility for unit testing components
Not much, but just enough, and you are free to add any component library you want, including:
- Routing: the React – the router
- Fetch HTTP request: Fetch (or Axios)
- Various CSS encapsulation technologies
- Enzyme for unit tests
Google and Facebook, as the main sponsors of open source projects in the Web community, have never been in constant competition with each other, especially since the Angular/React debate lasted four years. But strictly speaking, it’s not entirely fair to compare Angular to React, because Angular is a full-featured, component-rich framework, while React is just a library of UI components. To address this issue, we’ll compare React with some common component libraries in the Angular framework.
React VS Angular
Angular provides more out-of-the-box features than React, such as:
- Dependency injection
- HTML based extension template
- Route provided by @angular/Router
- Ajax requests using @angular/common/HTTP
- Form for building @Angular/Forms
- Component CSS Encapsulation
- XSS protection
- A utility for unit testing components
Dependency injection and other features are at the core of Angular, and you can’t choose not to use them. This is a double-edged sword that makes Angular more cumbersome as well as powerful modules.
Of course, Google engineers are aware of this problem and have worked to some extent to simplify the complexity of the Angular framework in order to make Angular 8 refreshing.
Vue
While the React versus Angular debate is heating up, another JavaScript framework, Vue, has arrived on the scene, making the race for the best Web development framework even hotter.
Vue. Js is a framework created by Evan You, a core Developer at Google. As a younger framework than React and Angular, Vue borrows the good stuff from both of them, a hybrid of functional and object-oriented programming. Evan You released the first stable version of Vue on GitHub in February 2014 (four years before Microsoft acquired the platform), marking the birth of an incremental framework for building data-driven Web UIs.
Despite not being backed by tech giants like Google and Facebook, Vue has been getting a lot of attention from developers since 2018. Judging by the popularity of the major front-end frameworks in the past year, most developers who are aware of Vue have expressed interest in learning it.
Developers who are already familiar with the Angular and React frontend frameworks should also spend some time learning about this simple, compact, and stress-free frontend framework. Hopefully, the following will help.
The learning curve: React VS Vue
Both React and Vue learn faster than Angular if the front-end framework doesn’t include TypeScript (even though TypeScript is often thought of as an add-on to JavaScript, additional class processing is required to fully master it).
Compared to React, many beginners find Vue cheaper to learn because it provides richer resource documentation and Chinese support. In fact, the Vue and React with the practical situation of the learning rate is roughly the same, because most of the Vue data directly begins with a single Web application development practice, intuitive and clear introduction to logic can indeed help beginners code faster, but, with the deepening of learning contents, when you need to develop complex Web applications, Fancy, flexible instructions and logic make Vue seem harder to control than React.
Technical community: React VS Vue
React is a Facebook open source project that has been around for nearly a decade, so it has a more mature technology community to support it. While Vue has managed to build a sizable following in just a few years, it still needs more people and time before it can truly build a complete and rich ecosystem.
When you look at many of the projects that have been done with Vue, you’ll notice that the overall design philosophy is more modern because Vue is still a relatively new framework.
While React has more tools, component libraries, and code packages, Vue is more impressive in its ingenuity, sophistication, and simplicity.
Security: React VS Vue
There’s almost no security on the front end! Of course, the security referred to here is only a comparison between React and Vue frameworks. Compared with React, Vue is more niche and different, making React an easier target in the face of large-scale hacker attacks.
Both Vue and React are also vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, the most common security vulnerability in Web applications. An XSS attack allows an attacker to inject client-side scripts into Web pages viewed by other users to affect any JavaScript Web applications associated with them.
PS: The best way to mitigate this problem is to keep the data out of the script, add a blacklisting mechanism and validate the data from the whitelist.
Flexibility: React VS Vue
This is where the controversy is most intense. React focuses on the UI, so you can get good support from it when building UI components. Vue is an incremental framework that allows you to build applications using only the most basic features, but also provides something out of the box: for example, Vuex for state management, Vue Router for application URL management, and Vue server-side rendering.
React was more comprehensive than Vue, which stripped away many elements. But if you’re looking for a lean, novel, easy-to-learn, boilerplate less, high-performance, flexible and complete front-end framework, Vue is more suitable; Of course, if you want to use a lower version of jQuery code, Vue also supports this.
React’s flexibility relies more on the strong technical community behind it, which is backed by Facebook (Facebook’s React team includes 10 dedicated developers) with more tools, UI libraries, and tutorials.
If your development philosophy is more full-stack culture, cross-platform, staying unique, leading trends rather than following, then you will love Vue; But if your project requires a large number of front-end developers skilled in using the framework, a large number of tools, and third-party libraries, you’re better off using React. Individual developers can choose their own front-end frameworks. For enterprises, instead of having to worry about compatibility issues with every framework update, they can get their hands on a front-end development tool that fully supports Angular, React, and Vue. There are plenty of great tools out there. Such as WijmoJS and SpreadJS.
The future of the Vue
As of early 2019, the competition between Angular, React, and Vue continues to heat up, more and more developers are abandoning Google projects, and Vue’s future looks bright in terms of a number of outstanding commercial development tool providers.
There has been a significant increase in the number of people who have chosen Vue for faster Web applications, and Vue is fun and easy to develop. While React’s large ecosystem has so far held the edge when dealing with more complex Web projects, the presence of a large number of Vue followers within the front-end community and the atmosphere of steady growth in the Vue community suggest that Vue will soon become as popular as React.
Angular, React, or Vue?
As a front-end developer, what are your choices between Angular, React, and Vue?
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