Since the inception of Javascript in 1995, there had been a number of frameworks added to the roster, all making it easier to develop single page applications (SPA) with and making web applications run faster. Developers today have a choice to make when it comes to choosing a Javascript framework. If developers want performance then they must choose a lightweight microframework. But if it is a large application with lots of bells and whistles then they may want a full-fledged framework that implements a MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern.

Each framework has its own strengths and weaknesses, allowing a developer to choose one for specific needs on a project.

Popular Javascript Libraries and Frameworks

In this article, we are going to survey 15 of the most popular Javascript frameworks and libraries. These are as follows:

• JQuery
• D3.js
• React.js
• Glimmer.js
• Bootstrap
• Angular.js
• Ember.js
• Vue.js
• Backbone.js
• MeteorJS
• Foundation
• AOS
• Bideo.js
• Cleave.js
• Taffy.js
• Polymer

JQuery

JQuery is one of the first libraries to emerge and is considered to be a legacy product that is still relevant in today’s programming world. It is a Javascript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, event handling, CSS animation and Ajax. It accomplishes this by wrapping a lot of code into methods so that a single call will perform the unit of work for you.

JQuery UI is a collection of GUI widgets, animated visual effects and themes implemented with JQuery, CSS and HTML. According to the Javascript analytics service, JQuery UI is used on over 197,000 of the top one million websites, making it the second most popular Javascript library.

D3.js

When building dynamic interactive data visualizations in web browsers, D3.js is mainly used because it utilizes HTML5, CSS and SVG. D3.js does this by binding the data and the graphical elements to the DOM then it allows the user to add, change and manipulate the DOM.

D3.js is considered to be the de facto data visualization library for Javascript. Other libraries can be used to provide the same data visualizations but more code is required or the end result is not scalable and graphs may appear pixelated.

React.js

If you are building user interfaces (UI) on the front-end then it is worth your while to look at the React.js library because it is rated with over 100,000 stars in GitHub and is considered one of the best Javascript libraries around. React.js is not a framework but coders working with it swear it feels like one. React.js is based on components which are either a Javascript class or function that optionally accepts inputs (ie. properties) and returns a React element that describes how a section of a UI (User Interface) should appear.

Developed as an open source project by Facebook, React.js is only the view layer of an MVC (Model-View-Controller) application.

Glimmer.js

Glimmer.js is an open source Javascript library for building UI components that is optimized for the mobile web. Built on top of Ember.js’s rendering engine, the library consists of thin components. Glimmer.js uses Ember CLI (Command Line Interface) to help create and manage applications. Written in TypeScript, applications built with Glimmer.js are also in TypeScript.

Glimmer.js templates use Handlebar-syntax that gets compiled into bytecodes that the Glimmer VM processes and translates into DOM operations. The Glimmer VM is a full-fledged VM that runs inside the Javascript VM inside the browser.

Bootstrap

At the time of writing, Bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework available. It is a framework for HTML, CSS and JS and used to develop fast, responsive, mobile projects on the web.

Angular

Angular.js is a Javascript front-end web framework used to develop single page applications (SPA). It aims to simplify development and testing of applications by providing a framework for client-side MVC (Model-View-Controller) and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architectures. The framework provides two-way data binding that allows for automatic synchronization of models and views.

Angular.js is the front-end part of the MEAN stack consisting of the MongoDB database, Express.js web application server framework, Angular.js itself and Node.js server runtime environment.

Ember.js

It is evident that frameworks and libraries help accelerate our coding efforts by supplying us code that otherwise would have to be written over and over again from application to application. Ember.js will certainly shorten our development time because it provides code that every web application needs. By providing code that loads data from a server, renders it to the screen then updates it if the data changes, it lets you focus on the more important parts of your application.

One of the more powerful features of Ember.js is the use of Handlebars Templating Library which takes care of the coding behind the data and the view. Once you’ve told Ember.js to render a given template to the screen, you don’t have to worry about coding any updates because once the data changes, it automatically takes care of the HTML that renders the screen.

Unlike React.js which is only a library that lets you develop just the view portion of an MVC application, Ember.js is considered to be a framework because it is based on a MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern.

Vue.js

Another popular framework that is based on an MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern like Ember.js is the Vue.js, also an open-source Javascript framework. The unique nature about Vue.js is that it is lightweight, easy to understand and easy to adopt. Web developers like it because it is slightly faster than Angular or React in terms of performance.

Vue.js is mostly used to build user interfaces (UI) that leads to creating powerful single page applications (SPA). Its out-of-the-box Command Line Interface (CLI) reduces the time developers spend in initial project setup and scaffolding. The CLI provides a project generator that provides the scaffolding that is ready for development.

If you’re a fan of both Angular.js and React.js but want a more lightweight framework that is easy to pick up, take a look at Vue.js because it has the best of both worlds. Also it is considered to be the fastest framework ever created.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js is a Javascript framework that has been around for a very long time but believes server side functions to flow through an API to minimize code. It is based on a MVP (Model-View-Presenter) architecture and uses key-value binding and custom events.

MeteorJS

Meteor or MeteorJS is a isomorphic Javascript web framework written using Node.js to provide fast rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform (iOS, Android, Web) code. It implements the publish-subscribe pattern to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write code to synchronize data.

Foundation

Second to Bootstrap is the Foundation framework which is supported by the ZURB company. Foundation is used by iconic companies that include Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo! And National Geographic.

Foundation provides a responsive grid and HTML and CSS UI components, templates and code snippets including forms, buttons and other interface elements as well as optional functionality provided by Javascript extensions.

AOS

The Animate On Scroll Library helps add some animations to a page as a user scrolls down the page. Using fade effects to static anchor placements, user engagement is key to using this library.

Bideo.js

Adding a full-screen video to a site background is an excellent way to attract users and keeps them engaged. Using Bideo.js will simplify including videos to any web page that takes care of scaling automatically as the window size changes.

Cleave.js

Cleave.js is a Javascript library that helps format your content while you are typing. It increases user experience by formatting and ensuring data entered is consistent.

TaffyDB (Taffy.js)

If your web application requires database-like functionality then the TaffyDB.js library is the one to use. TaffyDB.js is a Javascript library that provides powerful in-memory database capabilities to both the browser and server applications.

Using Taffy.js is like using a relational database because of the SQL-inspired operations including insert, update, count and more. To create a database, you simply pass in a JSON array.

Polymer

Polymer is an open-source Javascript library for building web applications using Web Components. Web components are a set of web platform API’s that allow you to create custom, reusable and encapsulated HTML tags to use in web pages and web applications.

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