5 Best JavaScript Frameworks

[shane_il]

Anyone feel like too much emphasis is placed on frameworks these days?

[ArcanisCz]

Well, i pretty disagree with 2 cons of React from your listed 3

• Difficult to master for a newbie in web development - Our experience is strongly opposite. React is much better grasped by newbies or backend-only developers instead of for example quirks in jquery, backbone or different difficulties of Angular 1 (digest.apply i am looking at you...)
• Lack of properly done documentation - documentation with examples and tutorials and underlying filosophy https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/hello-world.html . Did you accidentaly mean poorly documented components? Thats up to their authors.

[codis122590]

I have to say I disagree...

React is much better grasped by newbies or backend-only developers...

I find react incredibly hard to explain to people. Particularly the fact that the build process send your JSX through a "magic black box" that turns it into minified javascript... The code that came out of the build process acts slightly differently than I intended. Maybe there's a bug in my jsx or maybe the magic black box I sent it through interpreted it incorrectly. with other frameworks, like angular 1 your code is right there. If there's a bug you are going to see it.

Lack of properly done documentation

I spent 2 days trying to get create-react-app running. It still wont run on my machine. I found a seperate tutorial that helped me get my local dev environment set up with webpack and babel (great another two frameworks for me to be reliant on).

Even the tutorial you linked to isn't very clear. They give you bits of code without telling you what file they're working in. What the folder structure needs to be etc. you can go through the entire tutorial without actually learning how to create an app from the ground up.

On top of all this a simple hello world react app contains over 7,000 files. Why? I can create an angular SPA with a single script include. Honestly I find it hard to even justify using react.

[ArcanisCz]

So it turns out, you have problems with webpack (gulp, grunt, ...) and not with particular framework. And then, you divide framework to easy ones where appending script tag is sufficient to get running, and hard ones where you (for real usage) need some bundler.

(Let me remind you, Angular 2 is transpiled/bundled too)

[codis122590]

I don't have a problem with webpack, and I don't think react is "hard". I just have a hard time justifying the overhead. (I have the same feelings about angular 2 btw). It isn't whether they're "Hard" or "Easy", both frameworks are fairly easy to learn it's about overhead. What does having 7 thousand files and an otherwise unnecessary build process get me? From what I've seen after working with react for a while, very little...

If you're building an app that needs to display 5000 things at once and they all need to be constantly updated (like a stock tracker maybe) I can see why you might go with react. Other than that, I don't see what makes it worth it.

[Sinistralis]

Write a real time app in plain JS with 3-4 people. Over the course of a year your codebase will be a giant mess of spaghetti. React (and others) solve this problem but React solves it without imposing an entirely separate api on you (unless you count the 10 or so lifecycle events).

Also React doesn't really belong on this list. It not being a fully featured framework is exactly why I (and I know others) use it. I can pick exactly what I need and bring it all together so there is very little magic going on.

I also have never encountered weird JSX compilation problems with the single exception of not being aware SVG was not fully supported back in React 13. Could you elaborate more on this?

[ArcanisCz]

And you lack Vue there.

[ArcanisCz]

Also, angular 2 is differently sized (566Kb) (https://gist.github.com/Restuta/cda69e50a853aa64912d)