23 Sep
Popularity:
React is more popular according to stack overflow statistics and google trends. The user interface frameworks and libraries of JavaScript programming language work in a cycle. After every six months, they change positions and a new one pops up. React and angular have been popular frameworks from a few past years.
An Introduction:
Angular: Angular, developed by Google, was first released in 2010, making it the oldest of the lot. It is a TypeScript based JavaScript framework. A substantial shift occurred in 2016 on the release of Angular 2 (and the dropping of the “JS” from the original name – AngularJS). Angular 2+ is known as just Angular. Although AngularJS (version 1) still gets updates, we will focus the discussion on Angular. The latest stable version is Angular 7, which was released in October 2018.
Pros:
- Angular 5 comes with detailed documentation.
- The Build Optimizer in Angular 5 removes all the unnecessary runtime code.
- Big community and code owned and maintained by Google.
- Typescript and intelisense.
Cons:
- Steep learning curve.
- Migrating the app from old versions of Angular can be an issue.
React: React, developed by Facebook, was initially released in 2013. Facebook uses React extensively in their products (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). The current stable version in 16.X, released in November 2018.
Pros:
- Biggest community and code owned and maintained by Facebook.
- Ease of Learning: React’s syntax is simple but involves a lot of HTML writing skills.
- Big ecosystem
- Flexibility, Scalable
Cons:
- The environment of React is changing constantly.
- It’s kind of verbose. Writing components isn’t as straight forward as pure HTML & JS
Vue: Vue, also known as Vue.js, is the youngest member of the group. It was developed by ex-Google employee Evan You in 2014. Over the last two years, Vue has seen a substantial shift in popularity, even though it doesn’t have the backing of a large company. The current stable version is 2.17, released in August 2018. Vue’s contributors are supported by Patreon. Vue 3, currently in the prototyping phase is planning to move to TypeScript.
Pros:
- Backed by Laravel and Alibaba. Big players are starting to adopt the framework.
- Simplicity of the syntax and short learning curve for newcomers.
- Vue is very lightweight — just 18kb after zipping.
- Vue can be easily used to develop large and reusable templates because of its simple structure.
Cons:
- Lack of Resources.
- Being too flexible in structure can be problematic
Size and load times:
- Angular: 500+ KB
- React: 100 KB
- Vue: 80 KB
Although there is a significant difference between the sizes of the frameworks, they are still small as compared to the average webpage size (2+ MB in 2018). Additionally, if you use a popular CDN to load these libraries, it is highly probable that a user has the library already loaded in their local system.
Perfomance:
The Virtual DOM model is very helpful in terms of performance. Both React and Vue have a Virtual DOM. Due to a well-built structure, Vue delivers great performance and memory allocation. React, on the other side, works well and Angular is already ahead in the competition.
The performance depends on various factors. These three frameworks are comparatively faster than other JavaScript frameworks. You should not take performance into account to draw the conclusion because it mainly relies on the size of the application and optimization of code.
