.png){kind=logo}
JavaScript is at the helm of the most recent lightweight applications on the web. In its big ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, it's the ability to enable web front-end development in a way that is not only effective from a modern development need point of view but also more powerful and easy to use from an end user's view. Some libraries have become the need of the hour for developers because of their richness in features, community support, and ease of use. This article highlights the top 10 JavaScript libraries that a developer seriously doing front-end development should be aware of.
React by Facebook is one of the most powerful JavaScript libraries for building a user interface, especially when it comes to single-page applications. React provides the fundamental structure to develop large-scale applications in an extremely effective manner by modifying the underlying data.
Component-Based Architecture: React reduces the effort of creating large applications by breaking down the applications into several independent components that are reusable. It makes the codebase much more modular and maintainable.
Virtual DOM: React performance is dramatically improved by the virtual DOM, removing direct manipulations over the actual DOM.
Strong Community and Ecosystem: It has a vibrant ecosystem of tools, libraries, and extensions, like Redux; React is an inimitable, flexible choice for many developers.
It's used to build dynamic and interactive user interfaces in applications like Facebook, Instagram, and Airbnb.
Vue.js is an open-source JavaScript library that is known because of its simplicity and flexibility. Written and maintained by Evan You, Vue is often said to be a progressive framework because you can incrementally adopt it; and use as little or as much as you wish.
Reactive Data Binding: Vue provides a system for reactive two-way data binding, which helps in easy rendering of the data model.
Component System: Vue follows a component-based approach like React, but its core is much lighter.
Steep Learning Curve: Documentation in Vue is thorough and well-written. It can be easily understood by developers at any level.
Its application is usually in single-page application development and is credited to projects like Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Laravel.
Angular is a maintained Google framework and not just a library. It offers all necessary implementations for creating complex applications, from two-way data binding to dependency injection, routing, and testing.
Two-way Data Binding: The data between the model and the view are automatically synchronized by Angular.
Dependency Injection: Angular owns a built-in dependency injection system that helps make managing components much easier when testing.
Rich Set of Features: Angular out-of-the-box comes with a rich set of tools and features such as a powerful template engine, HTTP client, and forms handling.
Angular is used for enterprise-level applications that require a robust and scalable solution. Angular powers applications like Google AdWords and Microsoft Office Online.
jQuery may seem somewhat old-school at this point, but it remains one of the most utilized JavaScript libraries mainly due to the ease of use and bulky set of this library's plugins. DOM manipulation in the document is much simpler. It makes client-side scripting simpler by adopting the structure that is most familiar with how JavaScript has been used most successfully and efficiently.
Very simple utility functions: HTML/DOM manipulation functions, cross-browser event handling functions, and more.
Extensive Plugin Ecosystem: There are thousands of plugins available for jQuery, covering everything from UI components to complex animations.
Ease of Use: jQuery makes simple tasks that would take lots of lines of JavaScript code much simpler to implement.
jQuery is still widely used for adding simple dynamic behaviors on websites, especially where the overhead of a full framework is unnecessary.
Lodash is a utility library consisting of a very wide set of functions to manipulate arrays, objects, and other JavaScript data structures. It is an indispensable tool for any developer using JavaScript with a mind to minimize and simultaneously optimize their code.
Functionality: Lodash provides utility functions for common programming tasks, to make code cleaner and more efficient.
Performance: Lodash is optimized for performance; the code is very lean, with a quick runtime, even with large datasets.
Modularity: You can load specific functions from Lodash, which reduces the overhead involved in adding the whole library to your project.
It is quite often used in projects where there is much data manipulation, like data processing applications and algorithms.
D3.js is a library for building powerful and dynamic visualizations based on data. It provides you with the ability to bind data to a Document Object Model (DOM) and then apply data-driven transformations to that document.
Data Binding: D3. Permits binding of arbitrary data to a Document Object Model, and then applying data-driven transformations for its subsequent visualization.
Powerful Visualization Capabilities: D3 provides all the tools required to bring about complex visualization techniques like bar charts, scatter plots, and tree diagrams, with a great deal of control over almost every element.
Flexibility: D3 is enormously flexible and capable of being employed with any JavaScript framework, or just on an independent level, creating the custom visualization any aspiring data artist might desire.
D3.js is very helpful in developing interactive and dynamic data visualization dashboards, reports, and analytical tools.
Moment.js is one of the JavaScript libraries used for date and time parsing, validation, manipulation, and display. It is now in maintenance mode, yet it is widely used and it lays the base for good date work in JavaScript.
Date manipulation: Moment.js eases things like adding and subtracting dates, calculating differences, and formatting.
Locale support: It can handle different formats or locales, as well as dates and time zones.
Human-Friendly Display: This helps represent your date and time format in a human-friendly format, for example, "2 hours ago" or "next Tuesday."
Common use cases of Moment.js are those in applications where there is a need for flexible and accurate data manipulation, like booking systems or financial applications.
Axios is a promise-based HTTP client for the JavaScript programming language to easily make requests and handle responses from APIs. It works in the browser and Node.js, thus making it rather versatile for full-stack developers.
Promise-Based: Axios is built on the concept of promises. Thus providing a cleaner, more readable way to write code for handling asynchronous operations.
Automatic JSON Transformation: Axios takes care of transforming the data that is being passed as JSON. Thus, we do not need to parse JSON data.
Interceptors: Axios comes with the feature of interceptors both for the request and response. It enables you to edit requests to have better handling in case of errors for the API responses.
Axios is used in a web application to make API calls. It should be used in cases where the native fetch API isn't robust enough to handle the action you want to perform.
Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites.
Responsive Grid System: Bootstrap has an inbuilt responsive grid that allows you to develop an appropriate design layout that can effectively work and be easily visible on any device.
Pre-Built Components: Bootstrap comes with pre-built modals, carousels, dropdowns powered by JavaScript, and others.
Customizability: Bootstrap comes packed with lots of built-in styles, though it is highly flexible and very customizable to make it suitable for the maximum needs of the project.
Bootstrap finds its application most commonly in quickly building visually pleasing and highly responsive websites, especially for quick prototypes and MVPs.
Chart.js is an easy, flexible JavaScript library for making aesthetically appealing charts and graphs. It has a large number of various types of charts and is easily integrated with any web application.
A large number of chart types: Line, bar, radar, pie, and bubble.
Responsive: charts are responsive by default in Chart.js and work great on any device.
Customization: Chart.js offers vast possibilities for customization—users can change the look and feel of the charts as per their needs.
Chart.js is used a lot in dashboards, reports, and pretty much everywhere where data should be represented visually.
