Vue.js, React & Angular frameworks

Comparing Vue.js, React, and Angular requires us to examine different aspects of each framework and library, including their histories, philosophies, features, learning curves, and ecosystems. Here’s a concise comparison of the three.

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Historical Background and Philosophy:

• Vue.js: Created by Evan You after working at Google on Angular. Vue combines ideas from both Angular and React, providing a balance between flexibility and convention.
• React: Developed and maintained by Facebook. It focuses on the view layer, making it lightweight and can be integrated with other frameworks. React emphasizes a component-based architecture and reactive updates.
• Angular: Developed and maintained by Google. It’s a complete framework offering both template syntax and a rich set of features out of the box.

Learning Curve:

• Vue.js: Known for its gentle learning curve. Vue’s syntax is straightforward, especially for those with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript experience.
• React: Moderate learning curve. JSX and component lifecycle methods can be initially overwhelming for beginners.
• Angular: Steepest learning curve due to its extensive set of tools and features, TypeScript as a primary language, and its specific terminologies.

Flexibility and Design:

• Vue.js: Provides a balance between structure and flexibility. Offers an optional template syntax.
• React: Highly flexible. Uses JSX, which allows JavaScript and HTML to coexist.
• Angular: Opinionated about project structure. Uses TypeScript as its primary language and offers a template syntax.

State Management:

• Vue.js: Pinia is commonly used for state management in large applications.
• React: Redux and React’s built-in Context API are popular choices.
• Angular: NgRx (inspired by Redux) and Angular services can be used.

Ecosystem and Community:

• Vue.js: Growing rapidly. Vue has a vibrant community and a growing number of third-party libraries.
• React: Robust community, and a vast ecosystem. React has been around for a while and has a broad adoption in the industry.
• Angular: Large ecosystem, with many tools built by Google. The community is substantial, but some developers feel it’s more enterprise-oriented.

Performance:

• Vue.js: Uses a virtual DOM, similar to React, and is optimized for performance.
• React: Also uses a virtual DOM and can be highly optimized for performance.
• Angular: Uses real DOM. For most applications, performance differences among the three are negligible. However, performance can be an issue in specific scenarios, and Angular might require more optimizations.

Use Cases:

• Vue.js: Suitable for both small and large-scale applications. Its flexibility makes it a good fit for various projects.
• React: Widely used in both startups and large enterprises for building SPA and mobile apps (with React Native).
• Angular: Often chosen for large-scale, complex applications, especially in enterprise settings.

Mobile Solutions:

• Vue.js: Frameworks like Quasar, Nativescript-Vue, and Weex allow mobile app development with Vue.
• React: Offers React Native for building native mobile apps.
• Angular: Can be used with Ionic and NativeScript for mobile app development.

In Conclusion: Choosing between Vue, React, and Angular largely depends on the specific needs of the project, the team’s familiarity with the tools, and personal preferences.

All three are powerful in their own right and are suitable for building modern web applications.

If you’re a beginner, trying out each one to get a feel for their philosophies and development patterns can be beneficial.

As a developer and designer, I prefer using Vue.js because its templating logic is similar to that of an HTML template or Twig (for example, Symfony PHP).

With Vue.js, one can either start by writing JavaScript or, even better, create a template and then make it dynamic with variables that will be integrated using curly braces {{ myVar }}.

The template of a .vue file comprises three sections: <template></template>, <script></script>, and <style></style>. Therefore, it’s easy to create components and have everything in sight in one single file.

By using the Tailwind CSS framework, one can eliminate the need for the style section since the styling will be directly done within the template.