I interviewed Evan You, the creator of vuejs.org which is a popular progressive JavaScript framework. Evan works on Vue full time with the funding from the Patreon campaign. Previously, he worked at Google and Meteor.

This article was originally posted on Between the Wires, an interview series featuring those who are building developer products.

Okay, so I was born in China, my hometown is called Wuxi. It’s a medium-sized city, which is right next to Shanghai. Actually, I went to Shanghai for high school for three years and commuted back and forth. After high school I went to the US for college. I guess I got early access to computers, but I didn’t really get into programming too much. I was more interested in games, and I did play a lot with Flash when I was in high school, because I really enjoyed making those interactive storytelling experiences.

It seems there are more JavaScript frameworks, libraries, and tools than there are developers. As of May 2017, a quick search on GitHub reveals more than 1.1 million JavaScript projects. There are 500 thousand usable packages on npmjs.org with almost 10 billion downloads every month.

2016.05.29: The article was updated to reflect the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem.

This article endeavors to explain the basics and rudimentary differences between the most popular client-side JavaScript frameworks, libraries, and tools. Whether they are “best” for you is another question. Choose something and stick with it for a while. Just be aware your favorite option will be superseded by something

With all of the trend changes and advancements that CSS goes through, we shouldn’t be surprised at the large volume of free resources and tools that have been released recently. These time-saving CSS libraries and tools have been built to make our lives that little bit easier and also offer a clear learning window into CSS properties that we may not have adopted yet or fully understand.

In this article we have collected 30 of our favorite CSS libraries, frameworks, and tools that been released so far this year.

All of the tools and libraries have been categorized into the following categories: Flexbox Tools & Libraries

WordPress core contributors have started collaborating more around their JavaScript efforts this year with regular core-js meetings. One item on the most recent meeting’s agenda was discussion on choosing a new JavaScript framework for use in core as an alternative to Backbone.

Contributors began by summarizing the criteria for evaluating framework options, includes factors like stability, longevity, maturity, adoption, accessibility, proven in a WordPress context, and extensibility, among others. Most of the discussion centered on the benefits and drawbacks of React vs Vue.

The majority of those who participated in the meeting seemed to favor React, as it is already used with several major WordPress projects such as Calypso, Gutenberg, and Jetpack. WordPress’ project lead, Matt Mullenweg, has publicly stated that Automattic is betting on React long-term. Mullenweg has also

Everyone's favorite sarcastic talking pushpin asked an honest question about the state of the web:

From the outside, front end development in 2017 looks pathologically overcomplicated. Is this a fair perception? If so, why is it happening?

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) May 21, 2017

I replied with a tweetstorm. Here it is as a slightly more readable blog post on my ancient, creaky blog.

The replies to Maciej's tweet are interesting to read. They fall roughly into two camps:

1. Older/not front-end developers: because the web is shit!
2. Current front-end developers: because shit is hard!

As is often the case, both camps are correct! The web is a shitshow of wheel reinvention and bad APIs. It's also a blizzard of innovation.

When we set out to build MeetSpace (a video conferencing app for distributed teams), we had a familiar decision to make: What’s our tech stack going to be? We gathered our requirements, reviewed our team’s skillset and ultimately decided to use vanilla JavaScript and to avoid a front-end framework.

Using this approach, we were able to create an incredibly fast and light web application that is also less work to maintain over time. The average page load on MeetSpace15 has just 1 uncached request and is 2 KB to download, and the page is ready within 200 milliseconds. Let’s take a look at what went into this decision and how we achieved these results.

I assume you have Meteor js installed if not you can follow the instruction here. So let’s create a Meteor project called framework7-example

meteor create framework7-example

let’t add the framework 7 package into our Meteor project

cd framework7-example
meteor add keanghok:framework7

This package was fork from nobutakaoshiro:meteor-framework7-ios-material to make it compatible with the latest version of framework 7. It was suppose to act as pulling request but since the original dev is not responded yet so I have to create my own package in the at atmospherejs as a temporary solution to add it to the project.

Why is TypeScript getting so popular? Key development frameworks depend on it and it improves developer productivity in the ever-changing JavaScript world.

Nine and a half percent of the developers Stack Overflow surveyed are using TypeScript, making it the ninth most popular language, just ahead of Ruby and twice as popular with that audience as Perl. Stack Overflow reaches a diverse audience in this survey; the top two languages used are JavaScript and SQL, so this survey isn’t just querying front end development. In fact, TypeScript coders show up in all four of the job roles Stack Overflow asks about; web developers, desktop developers, admins and DevOps, and data scientists.

Software development teams often make decisions about software architecture or technological stack based on inaccurate opinions, social media, and in general on what is considered to be “hot”, rather than solid research and any serious consideration of expected impact on their projects. I call this trend Hype Driven Development, perceive it harmful and advocate for a more professional approach I call “Solid Software Engineering”. Learn more about how it works and find out what you can do instead.

Have you seen it? A team picking newest, hottest technology to apply in the project. Someone reads a blog post, it’s trending on Twitter and we just came back from a conference where there was a great talk about it. Soon after, the team starts using this new shiny technology (or software architecture design paradigm), but instead of going faster (as promised) and building a better product they get into trouble. They slow down, get demotivated, have problems delivering next working version to production. Some teams even keep fixing bugs instead of delivering new features. They need ‘just a few more days’ to sort it all out.

Build your apps only with best UI frameworks.

Personally, I don’t like it. Material UI had performance problems, but according to 3.0 release performance was improved.

I’m sure you know about Electron framework. If you’re interested in UI components for cross-platform desktop apps then React-Desktop is for you. You can find UI components for Mac OS and Windows 10 both.

Personally, I think it’s the best UI framework for React.

Semantic-UI-React — is the official clone of Semantic-UI for React. It has almost all most used components from Semantic-UI, but also it has a very good Declarative API, shorthand props for React components, and this UI framework is jQuery free.

This short guide is intended to catch you up with the most important reasoning, terms, tools, and approaches to JavaScript testing. It combines many great recently written articles about some aspects discussed here and adds a little more from our experience.

Look at the following Logo of Jest, a testing framework by Facebook.

And indeed, Facebook have an excellent reason to use this slogan. In general, JS developers are not too happy with website testing. JS tests tend to be limited, hard to implement, and slow.

Nevertheless, with the right strategy and the right combination of tools a nearly full coverage can be achieved and tests can be very organized, simple, and relatively fast.

Facebook has completely rewritten React, its popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. The company hasn’t previously talked much about React Fiber, as the project is called, but it has actually been working on it for a while. It’s now ready to talk about this project publicly in more detail (after word about it started spreading last year) and the plan is to put this rewrite into the hands of developers once React 16.0 launches later this year. It’s already in use on Facebook.com today, which clearly indicates that Facebook itself thinks it’s ready for prime time.

In addition, it is also launching a rewrite of Relay, its framework for building data-heavy applications.

Please do a mental experiment with me, imagine yourself back to 10 years ago stop reading for 5 seconds and take a breath.
Imagine then to meet a dev from the future telling you that in 10 years anyone will be writing their app routers in Javascript in this way

and that the markup of many websites could be rendered a in this way

what would you think?

Well if that happened to me I would say: ah ok so in future we will render HTML like we do it today in our file.include.php but with Javascript right? What’s the improvement? This is not even real Javascript right? Doesn’t it throw errors?

I am always open to new challenges and new technologies especially if they can improve my work flow and let me grow as developer. I care of the code I write for living because:

Should I choose Angular, or React? Today’s bipolar landscape of JavaScript frameworks has left many developers struggling to pick a side in this debate. Whether you’re a newcomer trying to figure out where to start, a freelancer picking a framework for your next project or an enterprise-grade architect planning a strategic vision for your company, you’re likely to benefit from having an educated view on this topic.

To save you some time, let me tell you something up front: this article won’t give a clear answer on which framework is better. But neither will hundreds of other articles with similar titles. I can’t tell you that because the answer depends on a wide range of factors which make a particular technology more or less suitable for your environment and use case.

There are a few things I look at when learning a new technology, and I’ll base my suggestions around three simple questions. How easy is it to setup? How easy is it to learn? How popular is it? Let’s get started!

React: Most React projects rely on JSX (writing HTML within Javascript). Browsers don’t recognize or understand this by default, which requires compiling those files to something useable by the browser. This introduced another step in the coding process, and a new environment (Node). Because React is a library, it also requires that you set up and configure each module you want to use.

It’s well known that PHP is a dead programming language and that its 22-year-old ecosystem is effectively useless now that we have Node and its fancy new asynchronous frameworks. Node’s superiority is evident because everyone knows that single-threaded, asynchronous, programs are better by default. Faster. Stronger, even.

“But Simon! Why?!”, you’re probably yelling at your MacBook screen. Here’s why:

PHP developers are not in demand at all. After ~22 years, all companies using PHP immediately gave up on it as soon as Node v0.0.1 was released because it was instantly the better application environment. Furthermore, everyone knows that to be a successful new startup (unlike Slack) you have to create Node-based web APIs backed by MongoDB. It’s simply impossible to be successful otherwise.

To start. Here is a screenshot of the component:

What is JavaScript compilation?

In my opinion there are a few variations on what it entails.

Angular has a really started to embrace build-time compilation. In the Angular world it's referred to as Ahead of Time compilation (AoT). AoT is a process of converting domain specific language in Angular templates to pure JavaScript that can be executed by a browser. By domain specific I mean things like ngIf and ngFor. Basically anything that is specific to Angular, but foreign to browsers.

The alternative is doing compilation at runtime before the application loads. This approach is referred to as Just in Time compilation (JiT).

In this post we will be discussing about some of the HTML5 Responsive Frameworks for Web Developers. Developers likes HTML5 because of its better interoperability between browsers and that's why it emerged as an important language for cross platform mobile application development. In this post we will be discussing about some of the HTML5 Responsive Frameworks which will assist developers to build responsive web applications.

Bootstrap is the most popular and powerful HTML, CSS and JavaScript Framework for developing responsive, mobile first applications. Bootstrap is an open-source framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites.  It is actually a powerful front-end framework, which includes HTML and CSS based design templates for UI components like buttons, drop-downs, tabs, accordion, etc. For more information about Bootstrap, read

Using a quality responsive CSS framework can give you a nice head start on any web design project. Some, like Bootstrap, are a bit bloated with excess code while others require a fairly steep learning curve.

Ideally, you want to work with a package that gives you just enough features to help you hit the ground running, while not weighing you down with a bunch of options you don’t need.

With that goal in mind, here are 10 CSS frameworks that provide the basics – without all the bulk.

FICTOAN aims to be a great choice for those who aren’t fans of larger, more complex frameworks. It features a vivid color scheme, custom icons and lots of lightly-styled design elements.

There are hundreds of free JS libraries out and it becomes real tough to choose the right JavaScript framework for your application. Some developers end up discarding while others grow rapidly and achieve widespread adoption. Many of the developers only know the big names like jQuery and React but there are many other popular JavaScript frameworks or JS libraries which must not be missed in the forthcoming year 2017.

Let’s discuss some popular JavaScript frameworks which will be trending in year 2017.

Node.js which is one of the popular JavaScript driven technology was created in 2009 by Ryan Dahl. The framework evolved as a well-developed ecosystem. Generally, Node.js comprises of three things. First, if V8 is Google’s JavaScript engine which is used in the Chrome web browser. Second is a thread pool which handles the file input and output operations and all the blocking system calls are executed here. Last is the event loop library. Top of these three blocks, there are several bindings which expose low-level interfaces. The remaining

Yesterday, I wrote about CSS Grid. Ted Mazer responded by asking on Twitter: “As a beginning front end developer, is it going to be beneficial to jump right into becoming proficient at this layout style?”

I replied to him on Twitter, (spoiler alert: “yes”), but I have a better answer that’s longer than 140 characters… so, time for a quick morning blog post.

• • •

In the beginning, we webmasters used HTML for everything — including styling font colors and doing layout. HTML tables were the one tool we had, and we abused it like crazy. Dark days for code. Bright days for funky, punk rock designs.

After a while, we realized abusing

Hello my friends, today we are going to look into the most popular solutions for functional web testing. For my review, I listed the most well-known and popular frameworks, sorted them by the number of stars in their GitHub repos and picked top 5. Here are they (the number of stars is specified for the moment when this article was written, and it can differ from the current score).

CasperJS is written in Python, i.e. it is not a native Node.js solution. However, I’ve added this framework to my review because it can be installed from npm and so it fits well into the Node.js toolchain.

Further, we will have a detailed look at each of them. We will discuss their main features and try to perform a couple of basic actions with each, which will allow us to understand what each framework is worth. I’ll describe what you need to do to write your first simple test. This review does not encompass all the features — only the first impression from getting started with the framework. As a test scenario, we will use each framework to find its repository on GitHub.

In 2017, the question is not whether we should use a responsive design framework. Increasingly, we are using them. The question is which framework should we be using, and why, and whether we should use the whole framework or just parts of it.

With dozens of responsive design frameworks available to download, many web developers appear to be unaware of any except for Bootstrap. Like most of web development, responsive design frameworks are not one-size-fits-all. Let’s compare the latest versions of Bootstrap, Foundation and UIkit for their similarities and differences.

Three years ago, I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine, “

TL;DR: Most JavaScript developers have heard of or experienced JavaScript fatigue. JS fatigue is the overwhelming sense that we need to learn most of the hottest emerging technologies in order to do our jobs well. This is unattainable and the stress we feel to achieve it is unjustified; so how do we manage and combat JavaScript fatigue?

Putting satire aside, JavaScript fatigue is on a lot of developers' tongues and blogs recently, and with valid reason. But what does it mean to have JS fatigue? It's often mentioned when someone hears about a new library, framework, dependency manager, build tool, etc. Let's do a quick breakdown of what JS fatigue means.

Right now the most promising size reduction approach is using the Closure compiler. Closure is still experimental, but you can get a Closure compiled app down to about 34k.

I wanted to see if it's possible to reduce this even further. As a fun experiment I decided to act as a human Closure compiler and start cutting code from the Angular framework.

The experiment is not really more sophisticated than taking a hammer to the Angular framework until you're left with a sufficiently small application.

It may seem pointless to manually tweak the Angular source code. This may be true, but I think it's interesting since it gives an early indication of a theoretical lower boundary for application size.

When building for the modern web you often need to create useful UI components. Whether you need a calendar, slider, graph or anything else that’s useful for improving or simplifying user interaction, your options are either to create it yourself or leverage existing functionality.

Developing these components yourself is often time-consuming and complex, and unless you’re doing something entirely unique it’s often not a great use of your time. That is where UI libraries and frameworks come into play. These libraries simplify the process of creating common UI components. You can leverage these existing frameworks and customize them to suit your needs.

Rollup or Webpack is currently the safest choice when picking an application bundler. Both are great bundlers with lots of benefits.

The Closure compiler is still experimental wrt Angular, but the Angular team has made great progress. At the time of writing the latest release is not compatible with the Closure compiler. However, Alex Eagle has made a custom, Closure compatible, build of Angular and RxJs. I am using a fork of his project for my Closure compiler example.

In the following section I will create builds of my sample application using Rollup, Webpack and the Closure compiler.

I don't want to put any of the frameworks at a disadvantage, so here are the configurations used:

by Modern Web on March 16, 2017

This article from Joe Zimmerman first appeared on appendTo’s blog.

Joseph Zimmerman (AKA Joe Zim) has been building web pages since he was 12. As he learned, he specialized in front-end JavaScript and has grown to be an expert. He blogs about what he knows on his own blog and several other blogs such as Smashing Magazine, Sitepoint, Tutsplus, and appendTo.

Vue.js’s popularity has been climbing pretty fast. It has about 3/4 the number of stars on Github as React, and more than double the stars of