JavaScript — Libraries and Frameworks

A brief guide to JavaScript, from beginner to an explorer

JavaScript is a scripting or programming language that allows you to implement complex features on web pages — every time a web page does more than just sit there and display static information for you to look at — displaying timely content updates, interactive maps, animated 2D/3D graphics, scrolling video jukeboxes, etc. — you can bet that JavaScript is probably involved. It is the third layer of the layer cake of standard web technologies, two of which are HTML and CSS.

I will list down some of the key advantages of learning JavaScript:

• JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world and that makes it a programmer’s great choice. Once you learnt Java script, it helps you developing great front-end as well as back-end softwares using different JavaScript based frameworks like jQuery, Node.JS etc.
• JavaScript is everywhere, it comes installed on every modern web browser and so to learn JavaScript you really do not need any special environment setup. For example Chrome, Mozilla Firefox , Safari and every browser you know as of today, supports JavaScript.
• JavaScript helps you create really beautiful and crazy fast websites. You can develop your website with a console like look and feel and give your users the best Graphical User Experience.
• JavaScript usage has now extended to mobile app development, desktop app development, and game development. This opens many opportunities for you as JavaScript Programmer.
• Due to high demand, there is tons of job growth and high pay for those who know JavaScript. You can navigate over to different job sites to see what having JavaScript skills looks like in the job market.
• Great thing about JavaScript is that you will find tons of frameworks and Libraries already developed which can be used directly in your software development to reduce your time to market.

Importance of JavaScript Web Designing

1. Improvement in Web Interface

In these days, what we are doing with JavaScript is we enhance the old, tired and true web interface — clicking links, entering information and sending off, etc — to be more responsive to the end-user.

For example — A sign-up form can check if your name is available when you enter it, preventing you from having to endure a frustrating reload of the page.

2. Word Suggestion in Search Box

A search box can give you suggested results when you type, based on what has been entered so far.

For example — “bi”, could bring up suggestions to choose from that contain the string such as “bird”, “big”, and “bicycle”. This usage pattern is called Autocomplete.

3. Instant Update of Information

Information that changes constantly can load periodically without the need for user interactions.

4. Loading Information Only When User Choose

Information that is nice to have and runs the risk of being redundant to some users can be loaded when and if the user chooses to access it.

For example — The navigation menu of a site can contain 6 links but display links to deeper pages on demand when the user activates a menu item.

5. Fixing Layout Issues

It can find the position and area of the element on the particular page and the dimensions of the browser window. By implementing this information you can stop overlapping elements and other similar issues.

For example — You may have a menu with several levels by clicking and checking if there is space for the sub menu to appear before showing it, you can prevent scroll bars or overlapping menu items.

6. Enhancing HTML Interface

JavaScript can enhance the interfaces that HTML gives us. While it’s nice to have a text input box, you might want to have a combo box allowing you to choose from a list to preset values or enter your own. You can enhance a normal input box to do that, using JavaScript.

7. Animation of Page Elements

JavaScript helps to animate elements on a page to show and hide information or highlight specific sections of a page and make it more usable and richer user experience.

JavaScript Libraries — You Must Know About!

JavaScript libraries are files that contain various functions to perform a specific task on the web page. Since these libraries are incredibly powerful and ease the programmer’s workload while creating a website or a web application. Documentation is available for every library you might want to use, detailing every function present in there.

Types of JavaScript Libraries

These are the top 8 JavaScript Libraries discussed below –

1. DOM Manipulation

JQuery is one of the most common libraries used with simple JavaScript. This library is useful because:

• Easy to learn and it has more examples than other JavaScript libraries.
• Fast and boosts the speed of the webpage to accomplish a specific task.
• Has huge community support and project contributors.
• You don’t need to be a pro in programming to create beautiful websites.
• Bug detection and fixing are quick.

2. Data Handling

Data-Driven Documents or D3.js is a wonderful library to use when you are dealing with data as it is extremely flexible with data handling. It manipulates the document based on the content and adds interactivity with the help of HTML, SVG, and CSS. The official site contains various examples to understand the functionality of the library. Some of the features this library provides are as follows:

• There are various examples available online to learn, both from the author and the community writing plugins.
• It has a large community that provides the programmer with various resources to learn about it.
• A bit tricky initially, data manipulation and binding generates complex visuals for a huge amount of data.
• It supports IE9 and above (IE8 with an additional library) since the team designed it for modern browsers.

3. Animation

Anime.js is a wonderful library to add animation and micro-interactions on your website. It runs with CSS properties, individual CSS transforms, SVG or DOM attributes, and JavaScript Objects and animates everything with a single API. The developers released Anime.js 3.0 on January 17, 2019, with various new features. Anime.js is relatively new to the web market. It is popular because:

• Works with all the common browsers including Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE 10+.
• One of the easiest libraries to learn for combining motion on your site.
• The source code for the library is very easy to decipher.
• It makes complex animation techniques like follow-through and overlapping animations a lot easier.

4. Database

TaffyDB is an open-source JavaScript library that adds database features to our website. This is especially helpful if you are dealing with loads of data on your site. It manipulates the data into tables with a familiar SQL-like interface. The advantages of using this library include:

• It is compatible with all modern browsers like IE9+, FF3+, Safari 5+, and Chrome 1.0+.
• With its small size, it processes any query very quickly.
• It is compatible with server-side JavaScript.
• It is quite stable and reliable to use.

5. Maps

Algolia Places is a JavaScript library that specializes in address search autocomplete for the website. This means that the user is easily able to fill the address in a form, with other details auto-filled by the form itself. The programmer includes it in the code to improve the user interactivity on the website. This is why it is in high demand:

• Super fast and easy to implement.
• It is pretty accurate.
• Provides a high- speed environment even in complex systems.
• Displays a real-time map for better visualization.
• Typo tolerant, thus allows users to make typing mistakes and still show the records they want.

6. User Interface

ReactJS provides a new way of rendering webpages that provides a great user experience. You can get dynamic and responsive web applications in no time. It follows the tagline “A JavaScript Library For Building User Interfaces”. The strengths of this library are as follows:

• It contains methods to reduce the number of DOM operations, thus boosting the page speed.
• The Facebook team is supporting the library; thus, it always stays updated.
• It creates high-tech web applications that are suitable for high-load systems.
• Testing and debugging is a lot easier as compared to other libraries.
• It has a huge collection of code you can choose from, for small or large-scale projects.
• It is very easy to learn and understand and is very flexible.
• We can reuse the code that makes the applications easy to create and handle.

7. Charts

Chart.js is a great option when you want to add charts to your website. This is a very efficient library when you want to include basic charts and graphs in a small-scale project. It is an open-source, community-maintained project. Chart.js 2.0 has some new features as well, but these are not well documented. The advantages of including this library are as follows: It has great community support; thus, learning to use the library is fairly easy.

• It is simple and elegant when we need basic graphs.
• The documentation is well organized, detailing every feature available.
• It provides very responsive web pages to the developer.
• It is a lightweight library, reducing its loading time.

Since there is so much to achieve with JavaScript, it can feel like a frightening language. But, never let this stop you from growing.

JavaScript Framework

JavaScript Framework is an application skeleton, a complete structure that provides the programmer with the basic tools of creating a website or a web application. They consist of a huge collection of various JavaScript libraries that supplies the programmers with pre-written code and thus allows even those who don’t have a lot of programming knowledge.

1. Angular

One of the most powerful, efficient, and open-source JavaScript frameworks is Angular. Google operates this framework and is implemented to use for developing a Single Page Application(SPA). It extends the HTML into the application and interprets the attributes to perform data binding.

• Well-designed Command Line Interface: Angular has an excellent Command Line Interface (CLI) tool to easily bootstrap and to develop with Angular. ReactJS also offers the Command Line Interface as well as other tools, but Angular has extensive support and excellent documentation.
• One way data binding — Similarly to React, the one-way data binding model makes the framework less susceptible to unwanted side effects.
• Great support for TypeScript — Angular has excellent alignment with TypeScript, which is effectively JavaScript more type enforcement. It also transcompiling to JavaScript, making it a great option to enforce types for less buggy code.

Well-known websites like YouTube, Netflix, IBM, and Walmart all have implemented Angular into their applications.

2. ReactJS

ReactJS was invented by Facebook, and it is the clear leader among JavaScript frameworks today, though it was invented well after Angular. React introduces a concept called a virtual DOM, an abstract copy where developers can utilize only the ReactJS features that they want, without having to rewrite the entire project to work within the framework. In addition, the active open source community with the React project has definitely been the workhorse behind the growth. Here are some of React’s key strengths:

• Reasonable learning curve — React developers can easily create the React components without rewriting the entire code in JavaScript. See the benefits of ReactJS and how it makes it the programming easier on ReactJS’s front page.
• Highly optimized for performance — React’s virtual DOM implementation and other features boost app rendering performance. See ReactJS’s description of how its performance can be benchmarked and measured in terms of how the app performs.
• Excellent supporting tools — Redux,Thunk, and Reselect are some of the best tools for building well-structured, debuggable code.
• One way data binding — The model used in Reach flows from owner to child only making it simpler to trace cause and effect in code.

3. VueJS

VueJS is a very interesting framework. It is a newcomer to the JavaScript framework scene, but its popularity has increased significantly over the course of a few years. The framework got so popular that many front-end engineers now prefer VueJS over other JavaScript frameworks.

Here are some of the key strengths of VueJS:

• Easier learning curve — Even compared to Angular or React, many front-end developers feel that VueJS has the lowest learning curve.
• Small size — VueJS is relatively lightweight compared to Angular or React. In its official documentation, its size is stated to be only about 30 KB, while the project generated by Angular, for example, is over 65 KB.
• Concise documentation — Vue has thorough but concise and clear documentation.

4. Backbone.js

Backbone.js represents the data as Models and provides various tools for a more structured approach in client-side development. It belongs to MVC type libraries. MVC (Model-View-Controller) is a pattern to create applications. Backbone.js uses Models, Collections (set of models), Views, and Routers. The various advantages Backbone.js offers are:

• Open-source, thus any developer can use it for development.
• Compact library, with all significant components for development.
• Easy to extend it with other libraries and tools.
• A fast, easy and lightweight framework to work with.
• It provides the developer with a lot of control over performance, especially in mobile application.

5. Aurelia

Aurelia is a modern front-end framework functions as a platform for building browsers, desktop, and mobile applications. It is open-source and built on open web standards. This is the latest version of JavaScript and can extend the HTML for various purposes like data binding. This ensures the interpretation of both client-side and server-side at the same time. Some advantages of using this framework include:

• Rendering of this framework is very fast, with a simple and powerful code.
• Since it always tries to stay within the existing and emerging Web Standards, it is very easy to learn for new developers to follow best practices.
• Most of the code written is Aurelia-agnostic. This allows the testing of code, switching it to another implementation and make even HTML code look business-oriented.
• Full built-in TypeScript support. It also has commercial support as an official product of Durandal Inc.
• Supports interoperability; we can use it with other frameworks like React because they are based on Web Components standards.ions.

6. Meteor

Meteor (Meteor.js or MeteorJS) is a full-stack framework that helps programmers to write the whole applications in JavaScript. It applies Node.js in the back-end and MongoDB for the database. It is an MVC framework that speeds up the development of Android, iOS, and web apps. The advantages of this framework are:

• It is a very good option for a beginner since it has very detailed documentation.
• The abundance of packages and libraries available make it highly-sought by the programmers in the web market.
• Open-source and free with large community support.
• Integrates with React, Angular, and Node.js (frameworks), Apache Cordova (command-line interface) and MongoDB (a database).
• Provides easy and simple hosting and deployment.

7. Ember.js

Ember.js is a free, open-source, client-side framework, used to develop web applications. It was originally called the SproutCore MVC framework. It’s a great choice when you want to build a large-scale project with lots of functionalities.

• Relatively popular and thus provides a lot of community models to work with if you have any trouble with your code.
• Supports data binding, making it more time-efficient.
• Works with jQuery, thus we can use any of its features in the framework.
• It has its debugging tool called Ember Inspector to debug client-side applications.
• Allows custom properties in a template, thus we can rendering the page as per requirement. You can add any function as a property and call it from the template.
• It is continually evolving, thus filling up the gaps rather easily.

These JavaScript Frameworks and Libraries play an important role in web development. Thus it is essential that you have at least a basic idea about these frameworks. Hope the information provided was useful to you.