My list of Node.js Frameworks

In this blog, I will discuss the features and advantages of frameworks associated with Node.js. It is increasingly gaining popularity and adoption in the enterprise sector because it allows us to build large-scale, real-time, end to end scalable web applications with JavaScript. The Node.js ecosystem consists of various frameworks such as MVC, full-stack, REST API and generators that assist us to speed up the overall development workflow. Most of the developers will prefer one framework over the other for various reasons but they guaranteed that not only make web application development easy and convenient but also accelerate the development process.

Deciding on the right framework for learning Node.js and future projects are still considered to be the most daunting task looking to strengthen our web presence.

With a large variety of these choices, let’s take a look at the most powerful and popular compiled a list of frameworks associated with Node.

Express.JS

Express.js is an open-source server-side and considered one of the primary, minimalist, the most popular and robust framework with over 42000 GitHub stars. It was created by TJ Holowaychuk, one of the members of the core Node project team. This framework is backed by a large community who keep on adding and improving its features and essence functionalities. Express.js is also referred to as the most reliable web application development Node.js framework. With the help of this framework, we can easily build applications with minimum lines of code. It comes with a small learning curve that makes it a perfect choice for novice js developers. At the moment, It has over 1 million customers and 200 thousand live websites.

The major advantages are backed by large online support community with use to middleware packages integration of third-party tools become done with decency and easy to learn as it comes up with the well-documented format.

One of the drawbacks is the philosophy of main concept “middleware” is essential to understand before starting to execute the Express.js.

Meteor.js

With more than 40K stars on GitHub, Meteor.js is a full-stack framework that bundles the key set of technologies that help us in building modern web and mobile applications. Meteor.js is backed by tremendous active community support, tutorials, documentation, custom packages and much more, Meteor.js lets us create remarkable web and mobile applications (both the server and client section) strictly based on JavaScript. It provides the fastest way to develop web, mobile, and desktop based application with use of open-source code. This open-source framework configures an open-source structure that supports OS X, Windows, and Linux. Its hosting services push new features without the approval of app store or weren’t pulling users for downloading new native applications updates.

The drawbacks are SSR service is unavailable and officially not offering Mongo DB support, we can access other available recourses though.

Koa.js

Koa.js is a powerful next generation web framework for Node.js development that increases the productivity of web applications. Koa.js was introduced in 2013 by Holowaychuk, with the aim to be a smaller, highly expressive and most robust development for web application and APIs. This futuristic framework is a much more precise and powerful version of Express.js.

The framework ditches callbacks and opts the use of ES6 generators that make synchronous programming easier and facilitates an upstream and downstream flow of control. Koa.js is a robust and lightweight framework that does not package any middleware within the core and allows us to pick and choose the relevant modules for web application development. Koa.js does not accumulate any middleware within its core and offers dignified suits of methods which make writing servers agile and pleasing.

Some of the disadvantages are relatively less community and less compatible with express style middleware. It usually uses generators which are not compatible with another type of node.js frameworks.

Sail.js

Another well-known Node.js framework, Sail.js is famous for its serviceability towards enterprise-wide systems. It was built by Mike McNeil in 2012. This framework uses Waterline that provides a database layer and a powerful object-relational mapping (ORM) solution. Sail.js confers the architecture similar to the one of Ruby on Rails along with an added feature that gives more scope to creativity and data-focused advanced web app development. A front-end agnostic framework, Sails.js is also compatible with all Grunt modules that are available and allows us to build practical and production ready apps within a few weeks. The Sail.js framework is mostly used to create real-time chat based applications and can easily work with other tools at the same time. According to the experts, Sails.js framework is able to easily run on “any database” and is quite responsive towards front-end.

LoopBack.js

LoopBack.js is created to ground up and connect apps to data using APIs; with packaging an API explorer variety of generators will implement it’s in code generators.

LoopBack.js provides full-stack development with built-in models and features for web and mobile solutions, which ultimately will boost up the development speed. and with the use of this framework, we can use built-in users and access role features.

Disadvantages: The difficult learning curve and major libraries are not free which conclusively increase app development cost.

Hapi.js

Hapi.js is recognized as a Node.js powered framework that independently runs without any assistance on Express.js. It was introduced by Eran Hammer in 2011. Due to the plugin extensibility of Hapi.js, these developers could easily battle over the limiting functionality of Express.js. For all these years, Hapi.js has achieved to create a niche of its own in the realm of web application frameworks. Rather than writing fresh codes, this framework focuses on managing tasks via configuration most of the times. The framework has a robust plugin integration and focuses more on the performance of the application. Hapi.js has various key features such as input validation using JOI, configuration functionality, caching, logging, error handling and helps in building site and APIs with a focus on clean code and performance.

Nest.js

Nest.js is for building efficient, reliable and scalable server-side applications. Due to its modular architecture, it lets developers true flexibility for using any of libraries.

It follows a versatile approach; the adaptable ecosystem provides the full backbone for each and every server-side application. Although, it takes benefits of the latest JavaScript features with design patterns and mature solutions for node js world. With over 63k numbers of weekly downloads, Nest.js uses TypeScript, a powerful superset of JavaScript. As a developer knowledgeable with Angular, which also uses TypeScript, we will not encounter problem building our backend with Nest.js as all its component and structure looks same.

The drawback: most of the time malfunctioning is a major concern to be solved at the same time.

In conclusion, those frameworks are elegant yet extremely powerful JavaScript tech-stack which used to develop a highly-customized and real-time application. With the adoption of these frameworks, it significantly extended the functionality of Node.js and made it a revolutionary technology.