Today React, Angular and Vue are among the most widely used and popular JavaScript frontend frameworks. They are mostly used for building just about any web and mobile applications that most of us see on the internet. Software developers usually end up choosing from any one of these popular frameworks for creating a dedicated and scalable app. In case your company is confused about choosing the right framework for developing an MVP (Minimum viable product), here are some points that can help you make the right call.
Should you choose Angular?
History of Angular framework:
Angular is an open-source JavaScript framework that was officially launched in 2010 by Google’s Angular team. Google launched the second version of Angular in 2016. Since then, multiple versions of the JavaScript framework have been launched in the market, the latest being Angular 13.
Some of the top-notch companies that are known for using the Angular framework include PayPal, Deutsche Bank, Forbes, UpWork, Wikipedia and The Guardian.
Features of Angular Framework:
It is primarily a Typescript language. This framework uses Typescript as a programming language.
It allows two-way data binding. This means that the automatic synchronization of data between the model and the view is quite easily possible. In other words, this ensures that data remains synced at all levels.
It comes with a built-in smart unit testing framework Jasmine and Karma. Both these testing frameworks ensure your codes are free from any kind of serious errors. More importantly, they ensure that all the components and building blocks of your application function optimally. Additionally, Angular has more than 11 built-in testing modules to fix coding problems.
It can easily build complex applications and even high-level animation with very little coding. All this is possible thanks to this framework’s intuitive API system.
Should you choose React?
History of React:
React is an open-source front-end JavaScript library that has been developed by social media giant Facebook (now known as Meta). Ever since its launch in 2013, this JavaScript library has become immensely popular among software developers. Its increasing popularity even prompted Google to release the second version of Angular in 2016.
According to a rough estimate, in 2021 it was the most used web development framework globally with 35.9% usage. Today over 7.4 Mn live websites are estimated to be powered by React Library.
Netflix, Uber, The New York Times, Airbnb, Zendesk, Dropbox and Asana are some of the top companies that use React framework.
Features of React:
One doesn’t have to go through steep learning to work with React. Any developer having background knowledge about JavaScript can easily use it for creating a web application.
React uses Virtual DOM and not traditional DOM. This makes it faster and more responsive. Notably, Virtual DOM allows developers to update the changes without rewriting the entire HTML code.
React offers great flexibility to developers by allowing them to use reusable components. This gives the luxury to developers to reuse the code & design components that were actually designed for other applications.
React offers great flexibility to developers by allowing them to use reusable components. This gives the luxury to developers to reuse the code & design components that were actually designed for other applications. This feature helps in saving incredible amounts of time and energy for developers, especially while working on large projects.
It only allows one-way data binding. This particular feature has its own pros and cons. The major advantage is that it operates on a one-way data flow. This makes it much easier to track the direction of the data flow and trace the problem within the data source.
React is one of the best frameworks for building mobile applications for IOS & Android platforms. This is all thanks to the launch of React Native in 2015. Meta developed React Native with the intention of making a framework that is intuitive and orientated towards mobile devices.
How is Angular different from React?
Angular is a full-fledged and structural framework that helps in building dynamic and complex web apps. React, on other hand, is a JavaScript library that helps developers to build only the UI components.
Angular is based on TypeScript while React is purely based on Javascript.
React uses Virtual DOM while Angular uses MVC (Model View Controller).
Angular doesn’t allow developers to add JavaScript libraries to source code while React allows adding JavaScript to source code.
Should you choose Vue?
History of Vue:
Launched in 2014, Vue is steadily emerging as one of the popular frontend JavaScript frameworks among developers. Although this framework is not big on functions and features, its simplicity and limited functions still have a lot to offer to developers. Not surprisingly, today many big and well-known companies use Vue for building their applications and websites. Among them, the most prominent ones include Nintendo, BMW, Grammarly, Adobe and Trivago.
Over the years Vue has earned the reputation of being a ‘progressive framework’ and one of its main features is that it is incrementally adoptable.
Features of Vue
Vue is incredibly small and lightweight. Its file size is merely 18-21 KB, which is four times less than JQuery. Having such a lightweight frontend framework means that developers can quickly download it and start working on their projects in no time. Vue’s lightweight and small file size also mean that it has a fast load time.
This framework doesn’t force developers to go through steep learning. Basic knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and HTML is enough to work with Vue.
This framework comes with extensive documentation. The good documentation not only makes this framework easy to use but also easy to find the bugs in the application.
It offers the best features of both worlds – Angular & React. Therefore, this framework can offer a balanced and holistic outlook to your project.
It offers a list of useful tools and libraries including CLI, Development tools, Vue Loader and Vue Router.
Like Angular, Vue also offers two-way data binding.
How is Vue different from Angular and React?
Vue is ideal for lightweight projects while Angular and React are ideal for complicated and long size projects.
Vue uses HTML based template syntax while Angular is written in Typescript and React uses JSX and native JavaScript.
Vue is more of a lightweight structured JavaScript progressive framework, React is a JavaScript library. Angular, on the other hand, is a Typescript structured framework.
Conclusion
Angular, React and Vue each have unique characteristics and, therefore, bring their own pros and cons on the board. However, we’d like to conclude that the nature of your MVP project should eventually determine the choice of your JavaScript frontend framework. For instance, MVP projects that don’t involve too many complex features and steep learning can opt for React or Vue. On the other hand, companies wanting to build enterprise-grade applications with a lot of complex functionalities should conventionally choose to work with the Angular framework.
Lastly, other important criteria like ‘learning curve’ and ‘time taken to complete the project’ must be equally taken into consideration. On both these accounts, React & Vue outweigh Angular. Since the latter is a full-fledged framework, not only is the learning curve arduous but the time taken for completing the project is also more. Nonetheless, it is critical to reiterate again that Angular’s proficiency in implementing complex projects is praiseworthy.