Shahzad Khan, Author at 足球竞彩网 Assembly Blog

What is a JavaScript framework?

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Student hands placed on laptop keyboard typing JS code.

A JavaScript framework is a collection of JavaScript code libraries that provide a web developer with pre-written code for routine programming tasks. Frameworks are structures with a particular context and help you create web applications within that context. JavaScript is a powerful coding language used in both frontend and backend development.

It is completely possible to build strong web applications without JavaScript frameworks, but frameworks provide a template that handles common programming patterns. Each time you have to build an application, you don¡¯t need to write code for every single feature from scratch. Instead, you can build upon an existing feature set. 

All JavaScript frameworks, like most other frameworks, provide some rules and guidelines. Using these rules and guidelines, any developer can make complex applications faster and more efficiently than if they decided to build from scratch. The rules and guidelines help shape and organize your website or web application too!

For example, think about a potter¡¯s wheel where you can build pots. The potter¡¯s wheel is your framework; it has certain consistencies that you have to work with. The wheel rotates, and you can use that rotation to build pots of different shapes and sizes.

You can build pots, plates, cups, bowls, or even cylindrical sculptures. But you can¡¯t build a house with it; you need to find a different framework for that. 

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Why is JavaScript So Popular?

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Our lives today are dependent on the interactivity that JavaScript provides. If you want to really see how much you depend on it, you can disable JavaScript in your browser for a day. Some pages will load quicker, they¡¯ll be cleaner, you¡¯ll have less ads, no pop-ups, and the battery life of your computer may last longer. But also parts of the webpages simply will not work. Neither will Netflix, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Maps, and much more. We are, to a good degree, dependent on JavaScript to function. Today, virtually every computing device including iPhones, Android phones, MacOS, Windows, Linux, smart TVs, etc.. in the world have JavaScript interpreters installed on them and in active use.

There are over 1.8 Billion websites in the world, and JavaScript is used on 95% of them

The popularity of JavaScript over the years.

JavaScript is by far the most used language according to Github¡¯s 2020 Octoverse Report.

So how did JavaScript get this big? Why did it get so popular? 

The creation story of JavaScript is the foundation of its popularity. 

It begins in the year 1995 at the Netscape headquarters, where young Brendan Eich goes into a ten day sprint of coding and comes out on the other side with a new language. Wow!

As more people used browsers to use and experience the internet, there was a need for a programming language that would give life to the browser. Something that went beyond HTML and CSS. That¡¯s where JavaScript came in to give life to the browser. It¡¯s a language that is capable of doing what all other programming languages do but also has a special relationship with the browser. It changed the way we thought about the internet and ushered a new era of browser based applications. 

Easy setup 

Unlike many other languages, where you need to go download the language in your machine in order to access all of its features and create a development environment, with JavaScript anyone with a web browser suddenly has a development environment right in front of them. Every browser supports JavaScript!  


You can simply open your browser, like Chrome, and navigate to Developer Tools, and start coding away! To write a ¡°Hello World¡± program is as simple as: 

console.log(¡°Hello World¡±); 

You can also use an Integrated development environment (IDE) or code editor like Visual Studio Code where you can create a file with the file extension .js to write JavaScript. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is more widely used to write code but there are other editors like Atom and Sublime Text which are quite common amongst developers.  

Event-based programming
One of the most impressive features of JavaScript is that it includes event-based programming. It has built-in events like ¡®onClick¡¯ and ¡®onHover¡¯ that wait for user interaction on a website before executing a specific segment of code. For instance, when you click the night-mode toggle, that is an event which triggers a JavaScript code segment that changes the CSS across the whole website from light colors to dark colors. 

JavaScript can be used to generate dynamic contents on a website as well. Different HTML tags can be generated based on user input. For instance, if you are on Facebook and you click into a comment box to type your comment on someone¡¯s post, in that moment your click was an event that executed a code block in JavaScript that led to the generation of an HTML tag to display your comment.

End-to-end programming with Node.JS 

While JavaScript has been given the title of The Language of the Browser, in 2009 with the release of Node.JS, a runtime environment that runs JavaScript code outside a web browser changed the fate of the language. Node.JS lets developers use JavaScript to write server-side scripting. Consequently, JavaScript¡¯s popularity was dramatically increased because Node.JS represents the idea of ¡°JavaScript everywhere¡± paradigm, unifying all of web application development around a single programming language, rather having a different language for server-side and client-side scripts. 

In other words, now developers can use one single programming language to talk to databases, make HTTP requests, generate dynamic content, and create interactive user experiences/interfaces. This led to the Rise of Web Applications that we are experiencing today. In addition to having a unified web-application development, JavaScript also became the go-to language for many companies because now the engineering teams only had to worry about a single programming language which made it easier to debug and save costs in the overall development process. 

In 2013 AirBnb launched their site and became the first to utilize the full-stack JavaScript solution. This approach allowed for code to be executed on the server-side and rendered in the browser with subsequent actions being handled by the exact same code on the client side. This inspired several other companies to do the same and today we have products and services like LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, PayPal, eBay, Groupon, GoDaddy, CitiBank and many more using Node.JS. 

JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks

The popularity of JavaScript led to the creation of several libraries and frameworks that have made application development efficient and performant. Today, libraries like React JS, jQuery, D3.js, etc.. are used in most applications across the world. Frameworks such as Angular, Ember JS, and Vue JS provide optimal performance and organization to build large applications. 

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Amongst the programming languages, JavaScript has one of the largest communities according to Stackoverflow. In addition to that community, Node.JS has over a billion downloads across the world and is one the most widely used technologies. 

These are just a few of the reasons why JavaScript is so popular. With the change in paradigm that led to the rise of web applications, unifying the web application development, cross browser support, and the plethora of libraries/frameworks available, the world of the internet has been fully invested in the growth of JavaScript. Furthermore, since JavaScript is a high-level interpreted language that is easy to understand, it is the one of the best languages to learn if you want to enter the world of programming and explore the amazing possibilities of web-application development. 

What is a JavaScript library?

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JavaScript is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. It’s a scripting language used by developers to create interactive user interfaces that display dynamic content. It is s referred to as The Language of the Web Browser because it is the most commonly used language to build web applications and works well across all web browsers

As the popularity of JavaScript increased and more people were using it to build websites and applications, the JavaScript community recognized that certain patterns in the code were being used repeatedly to accomplish the same tasks.

This re-writing of code and recognizing that certain JS functions need to be implemented multiple times led to the development of JavaScript libraries and frameworks. For instance, reoccurring animations and interactive forms that appear in different places on a website or app were repetitive tasks that could be automated by using a code snippet as needed without writing code every time.

足球竞彩网ly speaking, JavaScript libraries are collections of prewritten code snippets that can be used and reused to perform common JavaScript functions. A particular JavaScript library code can be plugged into the rest of your project¡¯s code on an as-needed basis. This led to faster development and fewer vulnerabilities to have errors.

What is jQuery?

There are many libraries and frameworks available to JavaScript developers today, but the concept of a JavaScript library was initiated with the creation of jQuery. jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML, DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation, and event handling, CSS animations, and Ajax. At the time, the jQuery library shortened the syntax and simplified the code, making it easy to understand and increased web developer productivity. 

All a web developer had to do was install jQuery and use prewritten code snippets to manipulate the virtual DOM. For example, if a developer wants to add an autocomplete feature in a search bar on their site, they would insert the appropriate jQuery code snippet into the project¡¯s code. When a user enters text into the search bar, the jQuery code snippet retrieves the feature from the jQuery library and displays it in the user¡¯s modern browser. 

What is React JS?

In 2011, Facebook created a JavaScript library called React, which specializes in helping developers build user interfaces or UI¡¯s. React

JS is a web component-based library and an open source JavaSscript framework that helps developers design simple views for each state of the JavaScript application. React is also extremely smart in that it does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of efficiently updating and rendering the right components when there is a change in data or the state of the JavaScript application.

Today, React is the most popular JavaScript library, and companies use it all over the world like Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Netflix, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, and much more. 

The web component-based library allows developers to avoid the pitfalls of rewriting code and dealing with complicated debugging. With React, you can reuse and recycle different components across the web application or other products.

Components such as navigation bars, buttons, cards, forms, sections, and the like can all be reused like little building blocks that make the web application. A library like React dramatically increases the development speed with fewer bugs and makes extremely performant applications. 

Library vs. Framework 

Perhaps one of the most common topics of discussion in the software community is the difference between a library and a framework. As we see above, jQuery and React are libraries with prewritten code snippets that we can use and reuse to build applications.

So while JavaScript libraries are a specialized tool for on-demand use, JavaScript frameworks are a full toolset that helps shape and organize your website or application. In other words, libraries are about using what is needed for the task, while frameworks provide you with all the tools you could need even if you don¡¯t particularly need all of them. 

Think of it like cooking some pasta. When using a JavaScript library, you simply grab the pot, pan, ingredients to make the pasta, and plates to serve. You only require only the things you need to make pasta. When thinking about a JavaScript framework, imagine an entire fully loaded kitchen. Another way to think about it can be that JavaScript libraries are like pieces of furniture that add style and function to an already constructed house. At the same time, frameworks are templates you can use to build the house itself. 

Examples of an open source JavaScript framework includes Angular, Ember JS, and Vue JS. These are some of the most popular frameworks with large communities and support systems. Frameworks provide a structure to base your entire application around, and developers can safely work within the structure’s rules.

The advantage of frameworks is the overall efficiency and organization. The disadvantage is that a developer has less freedom to work around the rules and conventions specific to a particular JS framework. Libraries, on the other hand, give developers more freedom to use different code and snippets but do not provide the type of structure and convention that comes with a framework.


Learn how to create a javascript library with 足球竞彩网 Assembly.