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Choosing a JavaScript Framework

Preface

Starting a project is really fun and exciting. You’re going to be building something new, solving a problem or building a product -- as a developer, project manager, or someone in the development process, that’s probably fun. However, sometimes choosing your toolkit isn’t as fun, especially in the JavaScript world where the choices can seem endless (and not in a good way). In this book, I’ll help you break down your process to make better decisions, and give you the lay of the land these days in JavaScript frameworks.

What do you mean “framework”?

For the purposes of this book, I mean the general scaffolding that you’re going to use for your application. The word “framework” gets thrown around pretty loosely these days, but at its core, when I talk to my team about “choosing a framework,” I mean “choosing the paradigm we’ll follow to build our app.” So you might see some JavaScript “toolkits” referred to as frameworks in this book, that’s because what matters is how you use it. If you use a “toolkit” to inform the way you build your app on an architectural level, I’d call that a framework.

Framework? Why bother?

A common saying is that 85% of the code you write is “common.”(source: testable js) HTTP server much? Chances are good that someone before you has had to:

  • Register users
  • Send email to people
  • Make relationships between objects (if you’re object-oriented)
  • Create an event hub (for event-based programming)
  • Organize their code in a not-insane manner
  • Setup tests for their code

The remaining 15% is your job to make your application worth writing.

Frameworks allow you to have much of your codebase be so much more thoroughly tested and put through its paces long before you’ve touched it, and so much more than if you wrote it yourself (unless you write a popular open-source framework, then please disregard). That’s why we use frameworks across the stack. However, in case of JavaScript, there’s not one or two true frameworks … try 26 to 2000, depending who you ask (there are 26 listed on wikipedia’s JavaScript framework comparison page, a list that also leaves out EmberJS, BackboneJS, and more; a github search for “javascript framework” yields 2,700+ results). Hence why you might want to read a book about navigating that decision-making process!

Who is this book for?

Project managers, team leads, scrum masters, developers … anyone in the development team who has an interest in the decision-making process for choosing your framework for development.

What this book isn’t

This book will not tell you what framework to choose. That is between you and your team, your business goals, and what’s important to you. The idea here is to give you tools, not an answer.

Sections of this book

In the first two chapters, the focus will be on preparing for your project. You’ll learn about the detective process of figuring out what your application needs to better prepare you to choose a framework. The next chapter shows frameworks in action, from the major players to smaller ones and an upcoming framework in alpha. Finally, learn about other resources to help you compare frameworks and compare on metrics.

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