5 Best FrontEnd Web Frameworks in JavaScript Kids Must Know

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JavaScript is a versatile and kids-friendly full-fledged programming language. With more experience, you’ll be able to create games, animated 2D and 3D graphics, comprehensive database-driven apps, and much more.

With websites, it can do a  lot of amazing things. JavaScript is a full-fledged programming language that can add interactivity to a website. This happens in games, in the behavior of responses when buttons are pressed or with data entry on forms; with dynamic styling; with animation, etc. backend and frontend web frameworks in JavaScript are widely used in web development.

What is a Framework?

A framework is a platform for developing software applications. It provides a foundation on which software developers can build programs for a specific platform. For example, a framework may include predefined classes and functions that can be used to process input, manage hardware devices, and interact with system software. This helps in streamlining the development process since programmers don’t need to rewrite the code each time they develop a new application.

JavaScript frameworks are an essential part of modern front-end web development, providing developers with tried and tested tools for building scalable, interactive web applications. Many modern companies use frameworks as a standard part of their tooling, so many front-end development jobs now require framework experience. 

Here we bring you 5 important frameworks for frontend web development.

1. AngularJS

AngularJS is a JavaScript open-source front-end web framework mainly maintained by Google and by a community of individuals and corporations to address many of the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications. It aims to simplify both the development and the testing of such applications by providing a framework for a client-side model-view-controller (MVC) and model-view-view-model (MVVM) architectures, along with components commonly used in web applications.

AngularJS is used as the MEAN stack’s front-end, consisting of MongoDB database, Express.js web application server framework, AngularJS itself, and Node.js server runtime environment.

Following are the features of AngularJS: 

• It’s a Cross-Platform: It provides modern web platform capabilities to deliver app-like experiences that are high performance, offline and zero-step installation. Strategies from Cordova, Ionic, or NativeScript are used to build the native app. Desktop-installed apps across Mac, Windows, and Linux can be created using the same Angular methods.
• Speed and Performance: Angular turns templates into code that’s highly optimized for JavaScript virtual machines, giving hand-written code benefits. Serve the first view of Node.js, .NET, PHP, and other servers for near-instant rendering in just HTML and CSS. With the new Component Router, Angular apps load quickly, delivering automatic code-splitting. So users load the code required to render the view they request.
• Productivity: It creates UI views with simple and powerful template syntax. Angular Command Line Tools (CLI) helps in starting building fast, adds components and tests, then deploys instantly. It has an IDE that helps in intelligent code completion.
• Full Development: It provides a full development environment. Protractor makes your scenario tests run faster and in a stable manner. Create high-performance, complex choreographic, and animation timelines with very little code through Angular’s intuitive API. It helps in creating accessible applications with ARIA-enabled components, developer guides, and built-in a11y infrastructure.

2. React

React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is an open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces of UI components. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is only concerned with state management and rendering that state to the DOM, so creating React applications usually requires additional libraries for routing and certain client-side functionality.

Following are the features of React:

• Declarative: It creates interactive and dynamic UI for websites and mobile applications. React updates efficiently and render the right components when data changes. Declarative views make the code readable and easy to debug.
• Virtual DOM: For every DOM object, there is a corresponding “Virtual DOM Object”. It creates a virtual copy of the original DOM and is a representation of a DOM object.
• Event Handling: React has its fully compatible W3C object model event system created. It also provides a cross-browser interface to a native event, meaning no need to worry about incompatible event names and fields. React reduces memory overhead as the event system is implemented through event delegation and has a pool of event objects.
• JSX: JSX is a markup syntax that closely resembles HTML. JSX makes writing React components easier by making the syntax almost identical to the HTML injected into the web page.
• Performance: React uses one-way data binding with an application architecture called Flux controls. ReactJS helps update the View for the user and Flux controls the application workflow. Virtual DOM adds advantages as it compares the new data with the original DOM and updates the View automatically.
• React Native: React Native is a custom renderer for React. It uses native components instead of Web components like React as building blocks. It also servers accesses to these platforms’ features, apart from transforming React code to work on iOS and Android.
• Component-Based: In React, everything is a component of the web page divided into small components to create a view (or UIs). Every part of the application visuals would be wrapped inside a self-contained module known as a component. Components in ReactJS are used to define the visuals and interactions in applications.

3. Vue

Vue.js (commonly known as Vue) is an open-source model-view-ViewModel front-end JavaScript framework for building UIs and single-page applications. It was created by Evan You and is maintained by him and the rest of the active core team members.

Vue.js features an incrementally adaptable architecture that focuses on declarative rendering and component composition. The core library is focused on the view layer only. Advanced features required for complex applications such as routing, state management, and build tooling are offered via officially maintained supporting libraries and packages.

Following are the features of Vue:

• Virtual DOM: Vue.js utilizes virtual DOM. Virtual DOM is a clone of the principal DOM element. The virtual DOM absorbs every change intended for the DOM present in the form of JavaScript data structures compared with the original data structure. The viewers view final changes that reflect in the real DOM. The method is creative and cost-effective and also the changes are done quickly.
• Data Binding: This feature facilitates manipulating or assign values to HTML attributes, change the style, assign classes with v-bind available, which is a binding directive.
• CSS Transitions and Animations: This feature provides several methods to apply a transition to HTML elements when added, updated, or removed from the DOM. Its features consist of a built-in component that wraps the element responsible for returning the transition effect.
• Template: It provides HTML-based templates that bind the DOM with the Vue.js inheritance data. The templates are compiled into Virtual DOM Render functions. A developer can use the render functions template and can replace the template with the render function.
• Methods: We use methods when an event isn’t necessarily related to the instance data being mutated or changing a component’s state. Methods do not keep records of any dependencies but can take arguments.
• Simplicity in Design: Vue.js is simpler in terms of API and design. A web developer builds simple applications in a single day!

4. Ember

Ember.js is an open-source JavaScript web framework, utilizing a component-service pattern. It allows developers to create scalable single-page applications by implementing idioms, best practices, and patterns from other single-page-app ecosystem patterns into the framework.

Ember is used on many popular websites, including Apple Music, Square, Discourse, LinkedIn, Nordstorm, and Chipotle. Although primarily considered a framework for the Web, it is also possible to build desktop and mobile applications in Ember. 

Following are the features of Ember:

• Comfortable: It’s very comfortable to maintain JavaScript Web applications.
• Development Model: It offers HTML and CSS of the development model at the core.
• URL Management: Ember.js offers routes that are core features used for managing the URL.
• Easy Debugging: Ember.js provides the Ember Inspector tool for debugging Ember applications.
• Templates: Ember.js uses templates that help to automatically update the model if the content of applications gets changed.

5. Backbone

Backbone.js is a JavaScript framework with a RESTful JSON interface and is based on the model-view-controller application design paradigm. Backbone is known for being lightweight, as its only hard dependency is on one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, plus jQuery for use of the full library. It is designed for developing single-page Web applications and for keeping various parts of Web applications (e.g., multiple clients and the server) synchronized. Backbone was created by Jeremy Ashkenas, who is known for CoffeeScript and Underscore.js.

When handling the DOM, Backbone.js adopts an imperative programming style, in contrast with a declarative programming style (common in AngularJS using data attributes). Trying to provide “the minimal set of data-structuring (models and collections) and UI (views and URLs)”, leaves the developer the choice of extensions for enhanced functionality. For example, one can use nested views with Backbone Layout Manager or model-view binding with ReSTbasis.

Following are the features of Backbone:

• Easy Development: BackboneJS uses JavaScript functions, making the development of applications and the front-end easier.
• Quick Assembling: Building blocks such as models, views, events, routers, and collections are provided for assembling the client-side Web applications.
• Dependency: Backbone.js has a soft dependency on jQuery and a hard dependency on Underscore.js.
• Structured and Organized Format allows you to create client-side Web applications or mobile applications in a well-structured and organized format.

Also read 10 JavaScript Machine Learning Frameworks Kids Must Know