Introduction to Angular Alternatives
Front end technologies are very much evolved since some last 20 years. From very basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript to a lot of libraries and frameworks, are available now with great functionality. Developers are now able to build very complex user interfaces in a very short amount of time. Since 2010 JavaScript frameworks started to evolve and at first, AngularJS made the entry in the market. It became very famous in a short time. Eventually, as complications increased, a new version of Angular was written, but it was incompatible with the old version. Due to this popularity of Angular started to decrease. In this angular alternatives article, we will have look at some of the Angular Alternatives that you can check.
Angular
AngularJS is an open-source web framework as a first version. AngularJS is backed by Google. AngularJS is the first front end framework that is based on the MVC design pattern. This allows the feature called two-way binding which enables to reflect changes continuously on a page. Also, AngularJS provides features such as Dependency Injection, ready to use templates, testing. It allows developing Single Page Applications with neat and clean code. These features make AngularJS unique.
Angular v2 and above is a complete rewrite and it is a TypeScript based framework. Angular features mobile support whereas AngularJS does not. Angular is an improvement and has compatibility with newer versions.
List of Angular Alternatives
Below is the Different Angular Alternatives which are as follows:
1. React
React is becoming one of the most popular frameworks nowadays. Some developers are switching from Angular to React. It was created by one of the engineers at Facebook. React is used in the development of Single-page as well as mobile applications. React provided some innovative features such as Virtual DOM, one-way data flow.
React is declarative and components based. This allows composing complex UI’s while maintaining code in a clean way. React works in the View layer of the application. React is smaller in size and usually requires additional libraries while developing complex React Applications.
2. Vue
Another angular alternative is Vue. Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework created by author Evan You which is now open source. Vue is powerful enough to build single page applications. Vue has some similar concepts from both AngularJS and React. It works in the View layer of an application, it has a virtual DOM feature and supports additional libraries, which is similar to React. Vue has a template style similar to Angular, but performance wise Vue is more powerful because it is more lightweight.
Vue offers features such as Reactive Interfaces, CSS transitions & Animation, custom filters, and very simple code. Vue is easy to understand and flexible.
3. Ember
Ember is an open-source JavaScript framework. It allows developers to build scalable single page applications by using best practices in a framework. Ember is based on Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) pattern.
Ember is being used by popular websites such as LinkedIn, Vine, Nordstrom and many more. It is also possible to build desktop and mobile applications by using Ember. Apple Music is the most notable example of this.
Ember provides features such as Ember CLI, Ember templates, Ember Inspector tool which is used for debugging. Ember offers friendly API which is easy to understand and work with.
4. Meteor
Meteor is a complete platform for developing web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript. It’s a free and open source JavaScript framework which runs both on client and server. Meteor integrates directly with MongoDB and can propagate data changes to the client without any extra code. Meteor has its own template engine for design as well as it can be used with Angular, React, Vue frameworks.
Meteor is best Angular Alternative as it is a full-stack framework, it is possible to build everything in an application by learning it once. Meteor is easy to learn and enables to build faster making it favorite for developers.
5. Polymer
A polymer is an open source JavaScript library for building web applications developed by Google developers. A polymer is used by YouTube, Google Earth, Netflix, and Electronic Arts to name a few.
A polymer is built on the concept of web components. Polymer offers features such as building custom HTML elements, cross-browser compatibility, Polymer CLI. Polymer does have some low side such as lack of documentation and support but again it is backed by Google so it might gain much more market in the future.
6. Backbone
Backbone is a lightweight JavaScript library designed for developing single page applications. It is based on the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) design pattern which abstracts data into models, DOM into views and binds these two using events. Backbone.js is in the market for a long time and have a matured platform.
Backbone provides some features such as RESTful JSON interface, Syncing with the back-end, Event Driven communication. Backbone allows building web applications and mobile applications in an organized and well-structured format.
7. Aurelia
Aurelia is a next-gen modern open source UI framework for developing web and mobile applications. It allows designing complex apps by using pure JavaScript or TypeScript. It follows the latest JavaScript standards. Aurelia is clean and has a nice API. Aurelia is concise and simple and at the same time, it is powerful and flexible. Aurelia is modular, it has a collection of libraries that can be used separately and when combined, they form a powerful and robust framework.
Aurelia adopts the modern and reactive based approach. It offers advantages and features such as Forward thinking, two-way data binding, Custom HTML elements, Testing, etc. Aurelia is developer friendly and is easy to work with. For those who are interested to work on cutting edge JavaScript applications, Aurelia is the best angular alternative.
8. Mithril
This is one of the most famous alternatives present for angular today. Mithril is a modern client-side JavaScript framework for building Single Page Applications. It’s small (< 8kb grip), fast and provides routing and XHR utilities out of the box. Mithril is used by companies like Nike, Vimeo and open source platforms like Liches.
It has already available documentation for common tasks. Mithril is all about getting meaningful work done efficiently. Mithril is a complete platform for building web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript.
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