JavaScript Trends and Frameworks in 2019
One of the most popular traditions at the start of the new year is summarizing the past year and admitting its brightest moments. Today, we’ll take a look at the main JavaScript trends and frameworks of 2018 and try to predict what will happen in 2019 just like we did last year. Let’s begin with a mass developers survey that will help us outline the current state of affairs in the world of web development.
What Did Developers Say? Massive Survey by Stack Overflow
Each year Stack Overflow performs a mass survey among IT professionals and enthusiasts. In 2018, over 100,000 developers shared their view on the current state of the IT industry, the most loved and hated technologies, and other aspects.
According to the results, JavaScript is still in the first place among different programming, scripting, and markup languages:
Among the most popular libraries and frameworks, JavaScript-based tools occupy the first three places:
Also, React is the framework developers say they want to work with most of all if they haven’t done that already. Node.js is in the second place in this list:
Since Node.js, Angular, and React are the most crowd-pleasing JavaScript technologies according to the opinion of professional developers, it’ll be wise to check their current state and consider the upcoming changes.
The Great Three. Node.js, Angular, and React
As we can see, Node.js and Angular continue to be the most commonly used technologies along with React, which is also important to many developers. Let’s take a closer look at them.
React
React is a library for creating user interfaces maintained by Facebook. The library is a good choice for large web applications and allows processing data without frequent and annoying page reloadings. Another distinctive feature is a rich set of React components. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, you can use one of the available components, what can significantly decrease the development time.
Since React is backed by Facebook, most probably it’ll continue to grow in popularity in 2019. However, there’s a strong competitor React will need to fight. And the fight will be rough. As you might guess, we’re talking about Vue.js (we’ll go into details later). If you count stars on GitHub, you’ll see that Vue.js has already overtaken React in a manner. On the other hand, there are NPM statistics demonstrating that React has more downloads, so it may be hard to say for sure who’s the winner at the moment.
Angular
Angular is mainly maintained by Google. Usually, developers use this library to create single page applications (SPA). Every couple of months Google comes up with a new version — from Angular 1 through 7. With Angular 7 developers have released some useful features:
- Angular Elements components now support content projection via slots
- It improves the overall app performance by automatically adding or removing the reflect metadata polyfill
- The Angular CLI can prompt users with the CLI Prompts capability in order to help them make decisions
- The CLI documentation has been integrated into the main Angular.io docs
- By using the default bundle budgets, users will get warned every time if the app exceeds 2MB. However, there will be an error if the initial bundle exceeds 5MB
Node.js
From year to year, Node.js remains one of the most largely downloaded open source software for implementing JavaScript code exterior to a browser. Node.js is built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript Engine (V8 Engine). When it comes to the server-side of modern web apps, Node.js has no competitors among developers who work with JavaScript. At the moment, it doesn’t look like this state of things is going to change soon.
Worth of Mentioning
Besides the JavaScript libraries from the Top-3 list, there are some other technologies that had a significant impact in 2018. Let’s consider the most interesting of them.
Vue.js
Vue.js was one of the most popular JavaScript libraries in 2018. Moreover, it’s the main competitor to React for the popularity among web developers. It’s a relatively new library that gained millions of downloads during the past months. In 2018, Vue.js received the highest number of stars on GitHub among JavaScript projects demonstrating wide recognition among web developers. One of the reasons for that is the clarity and simplicity of this framework. In 2019, the popularity of Vue.js will continue to grow thanks to the following features:
- Great performance
- SVG animations
- Open-source product
- Vuetify for implementing great user interface ideas
- Nuxt tool for module replacement
- Proxy support
- Stable API
GraphQL
According to the opinion of a large number of specialists, GraphQL has all chances to become a replacement for REST API in the near future. Truth or not, both these approaches will co-exist for some time, and there’ll be fans of both technologies, for sure. GraphQL is a query language that has gained broad acceptance. It can be integrated with React through the Relay framework. According to the statistics of NPM downloads, more and more developers use GraphQL in their projects.
DHTMLX. Latest Updates and New Frontiers
Last but not least we would like to share the results of our dev team’s work in developing JavaScript components for full-featured web apps in 2018. dhtmlxSpreadsheet, a component that allows working with Excel-like sheets online, received a major update and became pure JavaScript with support for Angular, React, and Vue.js.
Vault, a customizable JavaScript file uploader with an intuitive UI, got the same set of client-side wrappers.
Our Scheduler got trendy Material skin and support for horizontal scrolling and smart rendering for the Timeline View. The Gantt chart component obtained a complete pack of resource management features such as multiple resource allocation, resource load diagram, and resource histogram.
To help you start using our components, we prepared some detailed guides. The Scheduler documentation now contains info on backend integration. Also, we launched a series of video tutorials describing dhtmlxGantt initialization with various backend technologies. The first one is devoted to creating a Gantt chart app with Node.js.
Besides updating the existing components, we made our best to create brand new JavaScript tools. In 2018 we rolled out a new JavaScript component called Rich Text Editor. It’s a customizable JavaScript text editor, which is able to parse and serialize content in HTML and markdown formats and can be used in your Angular, React, or Vue.js projects.
Webix is another JavaScript UI framework that is likely to continue developing and become quite popular in 2019. It has a great variety (about 100) of UI widgets and full-featured CSS / HTML5 JavaScript controls. Webix complies with material design standards and contains 5 predefined skins. It is available as a free open source UI library under GNU GPLv3 license. There is also a Commercial license that gives access to complex widgets and a larger variety of cutting edge features. Webix JavaScript UI framework allows building highly-customizable web applications with outstanding performance. The activity on the community forum proves that the framework is acknowledged and highly praised by its users.
2018 was an exciting year, and 2019 promises to be even more interesting!
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