These Are the 8 Most Popular Web Frameworks

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the classic among the frontend frameworks and offers the developer a large selection of UI components and layouts that take a lot of work out of creating a website. The freely available framework uses a mobile-first approach. It provides a grid system with which responsive websites can be created quickly and easily.

Angular

Angular (formerly known as AngularJs) is an open-source TypeScript framework that can be used to implement single-page applications, or SPAs for short. With its component-based architecture and features, such as dependency injection or good test support, Google and the Angular community provide developers with a stable enterprise applications framework. A small downer in the history of Angular is the lack of backwards compatibility between AngularJs (version 1) and its successor Angular 2+ (from version 2)

reaction

Single-page apps can also be built with Facebook's React, which is also freely available. In contrast to Angular, React's component-based approach does not specify the structure of the application. Strictly speaking, the focus is only on the view of the application. If you want to build a complete SPA, React needs some support from other libraries such as Redux for state management or a component that takes care of the routing. With React's virtual DOM approach, the DOM can also be partially re-rendered, which makes the framework extremely performant.

Vuejs

Another freely available JavaScript library is VueJs. Vuejs also focuses primarily on creating an interactive view layer for a web application. With the use of a virtual DOM, you should be able to perform even better with the lean framework than with React. The first version of Vuejs was released in 2013 and was able to learn in many respects from errors in the Angular framework, which is a bit outdated, or from React. It is not without reason that it is currently being heavily hyped by the community and is considered a new star in the JavaScript sky.

Node.js

At the latest when the first version of Node.js was released in 2009, the programming language JavaScript, which is very popular among web developers, can also be run on a server or a computer. Node.Js is a JavaScript runtime environment and is ideal for developing cross-platform apps. With NPM, Node.js offers developers access to the packet manager with the world's largest selection of open source libraries. The asynchronous and event-driven Node.Js architecture is ideal for building web APIs and associated single-page apps (SPAs for short).

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a free mobile app framework that lets developers build cross-platform mobile apps using web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The actual application is only coded once and then builds are created for the various platforms such as Android, iOS or Windows Mobile. The app is executed in a Cordova WebView, which is basically nothing more than a mobile browser. With the help of a wide variety of Cordova plugins, access to native system functions such as Bluetooth, location determination or the camera is guaranteed.

Ionic Framework

Hybrid mobile apps can be created with the Ionic Framework. With the use of Angular 2 with TypeScript and Cordova (see above) to access the native system, the framework offers everything a hybrid app needs. Ionic is not just a framework that supports the developer in the code, it has become a complete hybrid app ecosystem. For example, apps can be generated with just a few commands using the Ionic CLI, or builds can be created for the various platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile). With the help of a large selection of ready-to-use UI components, which are strongly based on the native UI elements, nothing stands in the way of building a first hybrid app.

electron

What Apache Cordova is for mobile devices, Electron is for the desktop. Electron also enables developers to create cross-platform apps programmed with web technologies (JS, HTML, CSS). Valuable time and money can be saved by using libraries like Electron that work across platforms. Many famous desktop apps like Visual Studio Code, Atom or Slack were developed with the help of Electron.