It is that time of the year to revisit what’s going on in the JavaScript frontend frameworks world. It is a constantly changing world with new frameworks showing up very often. But the last few years have been consistent with frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular. Let’s dive into what’s going on now and the future of JavaScript frontend frameworks.
#1 React – Tops the Charts
React has continued to rise in popularity over the years and has been consistently ranked as the most used and favorite JavaScript library for building frontend applications. For the fifth year in a row in the State of JS survey, React has ranked as the most used JavaScript library for building frontend applications. Over 80% of the respondents voted for React as the most used library.
This shows a steady increase in the adoption of React over the years!
Latest React Features and Road ahead
- React Hooks – This is the most significant addition to React in the past year. Many development teams have adopted hooks in their codebase now. Hooks have made learning React easier, and help in writing functional React components without using classes.
- React Dev Tools – The react dev tools are awesome and super useful during development and debugging. React recently released a new and upgraded version of the React dev tools. With this release, it is available across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. This new version has significant performance gains and an improved navigation experience.
- React Concurrent Mode and Suspense – This is still an experimental release, and we hope it will be a stable release sometime in 2021. Concurrent Mode is a set of new features that help React apps stay responsive and gracefully adjust to the user’s device capabilities and network speed.
If you are a React developer, your job prospects are going to be highest in the frontend developer market. With the rising popularity of React, many enterprise companies are also moving toward re-writing their frontend using React. This is going to create plenty of jobs for React developers. In the mobile world also, React is trending with the availability of React Native. The benefits of knowing React can be translated to both web development and mobile development jobs.
#2 Vue – A Close Second
Vue has been making an impact in the frontend development world, ever since it was released. It has all the good aspects of both React and Angular, making it a unique framework.
The adoption of Vue has been steadily increasing over the years. 41.7% of developers have said that they have used Vue and would use it again, with another 31.3% interested in learning it.
The use of Vue as a mainstream frontend framework has been steadily increasing and developers also like using it. It is ranked #2 today, next to only React!
Furthermore, the learning curve with Vue is a lot lesser than some of the other frameworks and libraries. If you already know JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, it is very easy to start building Vue apps. Vue apps
Latest Vue Features
The Vue 3 core was officially released in September 2020. This is a stable release with the following updates:
- Vue 3 Release: It is faster, smaller, maintainable, and easier to target natives. This is a big win for Vue last year.
- Functional Components like React Hooks: Vue is also inspired by the React hooks concept, and allowed their own way to encapsulate logic into functional components and reuse the components across the code. This provides higher flexibility and scalability to Vue apps.
#3 Angular – Declining Trend
Angular is still one of the top frontend JavaScript frameworks and is used by plenty of companies. But every year, the interest and satisfaction among developers using Angular have been on a decline. Take a look at the satisfaction parameter of Angular on the State of JS survey of 2020 below:
The satisfaction levels of Angular have been on a steady decline year after year. It still happens to be used widely across the world. But if the developers are not satisfied, they may start switching to other developer-friendly frameworks in the future.
From the graph below, we see that 32.6% of developers have said they would not use Angular again, and 34.8% of developers are not interested in learning Angular.
You may ask why is it then ranked as #3? Well, although developers have declining interest in Angular, it has been widely adopted in the last few years. Angular is the #2 most used frontend framework in the world and you can still find plenty of jobs if you are an Angular developer.
The hope is that the Angular framework moves towards flexibility and better developer experience to retain its market share in the frontend framework scene.
Conclusion
Well, that’s a wrap! I like to drive home a point that frameworks/libraries and tools are continuously evolving. What may be trending today, maybe obsolete in a few years. Your expertise as a developer should not be just based on mastering a single framework. It comes with strong foundations. If you are aiming to be a frontend developer, learn JavaScript, HTML, and CSS first.
All these frameworks are built on top of JavaScript. In addition to the programming languages and their mastery, design, and architecture plays a very important role. Learn the skills that won’t ever lose their value. Learn design principles, algorithms, architectural patterns, clean coding methods, and general coding practices. These will come a long way in your career.
