The ecosystem that surrounds JavaScript, which includes cutting-edge tools, libraries, and, of course, brand-new frameworks, is also experiencing tremendous growth in popularity. Every other week, it seems, a new JavaScript-based application goes live and blows up the entire web community! The software development industry is becoming increasingly diverse, vibrant, and adapting rapidly to emerging technologies. Rather than utilizing plain JavaScript, designers utilize new JavaScript frontend frameworks to rapidly foster intuitive web applications and they become the foundation of single page applications, giving a vast improvement to plain JavaScript.

On the opposite side, it is difficult as you would remember to make a responsive, liquid and viable connection point for web applications as there is information to be sent back to the server and the outcomes parsed, information stores to be refreshed and more to be finished behind the scenes.  Let's talk about some of the cutting-edge and influential front-end development JavaScript frameworks. The best five JavaScript frameworks for modern web apps are presented here.

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  1. AngularJS

AngularJS first released in 2009, but literally didn’t hit the peak until it came under Google’s patronage. It gained traction in early 2012 and exploded in popularity in the following years. Google trends over time show its immense reach to the robust community of developers.

AngularJS trends

The core of AngularJS is two-way binding. The developer community has come up with their next version which overcomes AngularJS 1.0 drawbacks. AngularJS 1.0 is very popular and adopted by many organisations in recent years. A big achievement that Google has made with AngularJS 2.0 is that its mobile performance and Ionic Framework has committed to adopting the framework.

Overall, AngularJS will continue to grow and rule the frontend frameworks, and further strengthen its role within the enterprise upon the release of AngularJS 2.0. Since the new version is component based, developers can easily enforce the code-reusability and also benefit on the hybrid applications development using the same frontend framework.

  1. ReactJS

Recently released Frontend framework ReactJS is giving tough competition to AngularJS, but still not yet replaced its place. Having said that, ReactJS has made impression already and powered Facebook & Instagram for their user interface. This proves that how powerful is ReactJS when it comes to building enterprise large scale applications of extreme dynamic nature. Released in 2013 by Facebook, it takes a component driven methodology. Simply put, ReactJS is V in MVC – the view part.

ReactJS DOM

ReactJS allows creating a virtual DOM, which can be rendered either at client side or server side and communicate back and forth for faster performance. React admin suits in some scenarios as such when you want a powerful View layer but don’t need an elaborate framework for the rest of your application or when you want a View layer to go with your other frontend frameworks and also when you are trying to build an isomorphic web framework. React Native looks like a game changer in some situation by addressing serious SEO issues.

  1. Ember.js

Though Ember is not popular compared to ReactJS and AngularJS, the core team includes people like Yehuda Katz, who was part of RoR and Jquery core teams. Ember often said that it is redolent of Rails, no surprise due to Katz role in that project. Ember calls itself as “a framework for creating ambitious web applications”, surely it doesn’t waste your time of learning & implementing it. It is also an MVC framework includes a concept of web components, automatically updates when data changes and also has a routing and model engine that work with Restful APIs.

It is coming up with Fastboot.js module that allows server-side rendering of DOM, the concept similar to what ReactJS is already using for better performance in complex UI rendering. Ember.js targets the best of both AngularJS (two way binding) and ReactJS (server-side rendering). But Ember.js is not completely mature and needs good improvement in areas of weakness. Ember is suggested for those who has a tight timeline and budget constraints where it can use multiple features from both Angular and React. Ember team has announced that it will have the improvement soon, which is great news for the community.

  1. Meteor.js

Meteor.js is not considered as a one of the JavaScript frontend frameworks but rather a full-stack development framework. It enables to build end to end mobile and web applications completely in JavaScript framework. Meteor.js acts like a power packed player which has all the features such as frontend rendering, architecture level structure, database management and backend development. It was first released in 2012 by Meteor development group. It is modular and packages & libraries can be used on demand, it uses only JavaScript for an end to end application, no investment in any other languages.

From a long-term perspective, Meteor.js has some limits w.r.t their speed concern and complexity in nature. The  use of global variables, MongoDB dependency, security issues, NIH approach instead of NPM are some of the issues and hence it is limited to getting a project up and running quickly for a Hackathon or MVP, but anything more complex is not going to be a time saver in the long run.

  1. Backbone.js

First released in 2010 by Jeremy Ashkenas, as an open source JavaScript frontend framework under MIT license. Some of the big shots implemented Backbone.js are Pinterest, Foursquare, Walmart etc. The list goes long and these names are just a subset of what backbone.js users. Since the entire structure is lightweight, Backbone.js shines more when used in simpler projects where speed matters, say single page applications (Pinterest, Twitter) or widget that is a part of a traditional web application.

Backbone

Above shows the interest over time from the date it was released. Backbone.js released with stunning features in the initial stage in a way that the entire application can even build a fully functional opinionated framework with backbone.js at the core. Having said that, backbone.js is difficult for newcomers and consumes more to get a grip out of it. It lacks server-side rendering as well which impacts the SEO. Of course, there are workarounds for these concerns, but definitely, something to keep in mind.

Final Thoughts

The number of developers who put an effort in to learn and create structured approaches using JavaScript is growing in stunning space. The importance of UI frameworks in today’s application development accelerates JavaScript growth more, primarily in AngularJS & ReactJS.

Once you go through the article, you may be able to identify one of the JavaScript frontend frameworks which is the best choice for your requirement. We are impressed with AngularJS and ReactJS. That said, all of them are good though. Ultimately the framework you choose to invest in will happen to personal preference and type of requirement/projects that you want to work on. However, if you are a developer, you can skim through each framework and try it out. For investors, do research or consult with good firm and dive into a perfect fit for your solution.