Frameworks (Javascript)

Javascript frameworks are abundant and everywhere, so I wanted to collate a list with some blurbs and first impressions.

Disclaimer that ease of development should not be your only criteria when picking a framework. There are many things that are sacrificed the more involved your client's workload gets[13-15].

Frameworks

Alpine.js: A really minimal framework that also allows functionality to be added to the HTML markup. Surprisingly full featured, has side-effect handling and a global store, too.

Backbone[4]: A jQuery solution that is more of a way to model and organize the data you are going to be passing around. Uses templating from Underscore to build components. A tutorial is here.

Fresh[10]: Server-side framework that allows selective hydration for very fast pages. Uses Preact (which is a smaller React) and Typescript.

htmx[6] and _hyperscript[8]: Super lightweight and lets you bake in your actions directly to the HTML. If your app is simple enough, means no extra JS is needed at all. Wild stuff.

Marko[3]: Can write your functionality into the HTML similar to Vue.

React: The classic. Makes SPA's slick and clean using components, but requires quite a few dependencies and Webpack and Babel, so is a bit unwieldy.

SolidJS: A healthy blend of the React-like declarative reactive framework, with the benefit of compiled vanilla Javascript code that isn't difficult to manipulate in the way that React often prohibits.

Svelte[7]: A framework that has no dependencies; all the tooling, building, compiling are made in house. Seems to look really good, and I would love to use this in the future.

Vue: Allows functionality to be written in your HTML components, along with accompanying CSS and JS for each component.

References

  1. https://reactjs.org/
  2. https://github.com/vuejs/vue
  3. https://markojs.com/
  4. https://backbonejs.org/#Getting-started
  5. https://alpinejs.dev/
  6. https://htmx.org/
  7. https://svelte.dev/
  8. https://hyperscript.org/docs/
  9. Pretty comprehensive list of frameworks and their many different types
  10. https://fresh.deno.dev/
  11. https://vanillajstoolkit.com/libraries/
  12. https://www.solidjs.com/
  13. Making the world's fastest website and other mistakes
  14. radEventListener: a Tale of Client-side Framework Performance
  15. Frontend Performance: React SSR and the Uncanny Valley
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Last modified: 202401040446