Five JavaScript Frameworks to learn in 2017?

I made my own list of, in my opinion, the hottest javascript frameworks for 2017. The 2016 is gone with so many fresh news about the web programming world, the evolution of AngularJS 1 to AngularJS 2 from Google, ReactJS in a good shape with Facebook behind it, the introduction of VueJS 2.0 , the presence of Meteor and Ember, etc.

Do you agree with my selection and order of relevance? If not, please leave your comment and stand up for you favorite framework, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

1 - VueJS.

This is a very interesting library and is one of my favorite since it is a very light weight . Designed to be incrementally adoptable, the main core is only focused on the UI but by adding other tools you can get very powerful single page apps (SPAs). It is small and can be included in any project very easy, just dropping a script line into the page is enough. Benchmarking tests give faith that is faster than React and in some concepts is more explicit than Angular, basically this library take the best of all the libraries and frameworks in this top and puts it together in one handy package (DOESN’T mean this is the best solution for every situation). There is small community behind the project (85 contributors at the moment of writing this article) and maybe because of this it isn’t so popular as React or Angular. I Recently created this quick introduction to VueJs, you can check t out here https://www.jomendez.com/2017/03/14/quick-introduction-vuejs/

Sites using it are laravel.com, gitlab.com and laracasts.com. Others sites can be consulted here.

2 - Angular.

Angular 2 is the evolution of Angular 1, the entire framework was rewritten and potentially improved in the version 2. Been a MVC framework sponsored by Google provides some charming points related to high speed to create production code and be able of testing each part of the app. A major drawback here is the fact that the version 1 isn’t compatible with version 2 so if you want to migrate you need to rewrite your entire project. Angular is preferred for big enterprise applications with high standards of code readability. A powerful feature here is the directives, to enhance the functions of HTML elements. I've been an Angular lover since the beginning and I have written few articles about it https://www.jomendez.com/category/angularjs/. I also started to write a series of mini-challenges that you can find here https://www.jomendez.com/angularjs-mini-challenges/

Some of the sites using Angular: YouTube for PS3, Freelancer.com and Netflix.com.

3 - ReactJs

ReactJS is Facebook's front-end framework. It is a library well known by the render speed, thanks to the use of a virtual DOM. It’s open source and each day gains more popularity because of this. Even thought it is just a library focused on UI (it doesn't handle routing, etc.) is very efficient in apps with heavy processing in the UI, like Facebook, of course it is used in Facebook products, like facebook.com and Instagram to represent the user interface. Also it is declarative so when you change data only the updated parts are refreshed. Some people says that learning React is a little bit hard but when you understand it is pretty straightforward. I recently wrote an article related to react: https://www.jomendez.com/2017/01/26/redux-with-react-first-look/ https://www.jomendez.com/2017/01/30/jsx-preprocessor-syntax-sugar-reactjs/

Sites using react: hackerone.com, hipchat.com. To see a full list you can go here here.

4 - Meteor

Meteor is a framework with a lot of featuring for both back-end and front-end development, also to database management. Basically it is a full-stack solution including libraries to frontend rendering, a server based on Node.js and a CLI. All the previous features together allow us to create large size web apps using JS in the server side as well as in the client side. The idea of this framework is: ‘Meteor is full-stack and easy to learn’.

Sites using meteor: partner.microsoft.com and the Meteor official site itself. there is a list you can check here.

5 - EmberJs

Ember is another MVC framework. Very similar to BackboneJS and popular between Ruby on Rails developer, it is used for complex, rich web apps and websites. If you take in count it has a very easy learning curve, plus the fact that out there are tons of code examples and tutorials it worth to try.

Sites using Ember: linkedin.com and twitch.tv. Others sites using Ember can be found here.

2017 JavaScript frameworks trend

Conclusion:

For enterprise applications and production code, we have to be very careful when we choose a front-end framework, we have to consider a lot of things, like stability, popularity/support, learning resources available, etc. Two years ago we decide to implement Angularjs 1.x (we could choose EmberJs, very popular at the moment) in the internal apps for the company I work with, now Angular 1 is becoming legacy, the angular team is cooking Angular 4, and we need to start thinking forward to migrate to keep up to date with the technology. My point is that we as Front-end developers should be always learning and experimenting with the frameworks that is hot/new in the market because it can become the standard. I love to talk/chat about code, programming, frameworks, etc. You can contact me @jomendezdev on twitter or here on Linkedin I share news related to web development, and also try write often about programming.