Front-end development has become critical to creating engaging and interactive websites and applications. However, the ever-evolving landscape of front-end development can be overwhelming for developers. The plethora of frameworks, libraries, and tools can lead to disorganization, confusion, and bloat, making it difficult for developers to create optimized and efficient code.
We talked to our Frontend team and together we will unravel the world of the frontend ecosystem.
The frontend ecosystem
In the early days of the web, server-side rendering was the primary method of generating HTML content and delivering it to clients. This involved writing server-side scripts in languages such as PHP, Perl, or Java to dynamically generate HTML pages based on user requests. This approach was simple and effective but limited when building dynamic and interactive user interfaces.
As web applications became more complex and interactive, client-side JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, Backbone, and Angular emerged, allowing for more dynamic and interactive user interfaces. However, this came at the cost of slower initial page load times and poor search engine optimization, as search engines could not easily index the dynamically generated content.
The 3 biggest players in the modern frontend ecosystem are React, Vue, and Angular. According to statistics from the State of JavaScript Survey 2020, React is the most popular framework with a 68.9% adoption rate among developers. It is followed by Vue with a 29.4% adoption rate, and Angular with a 25.1% adoption rate.
With this, we can see that even before starting a project you have a choice between 3 frameworks that basically do the same thing. They may do it in different ways (though often there is significant overlap) but in the end, everyone is a component-based client-side library (React/Vue) or framework (Angular).
As an example, let’s take the core functionality of these frontend tools, rendering the page view.
Different approaches
The DOM (Document Object Model) represents the HTML tree in “Nodes”. Nodes are JavaScript objects that hold attributes, content, and child objects. This is then abstracted further into the VDOM (Virtual Document Object Model). This is a lightweight copy of the DOM. It is used to compare the actual DOM to see if there are changes and if it needs to be updated. With this approach, it is possible to avoid re-rendering the application unnecessarily.
React and Vue use DOM and VDOM while Angular uses change detection.
Change detection is a mechanism that tracks changes in an application’s data and updates the user interface accordingly.
Here we can see that React and Vue take a similar approach to solve the problem of re-rendering while Angular does its thing.
This approach can be more efficient than React’s virtual DOM approach in some cases, as it avoids the overhead of creating and managing a virtual DOM. However, it can also be less performant in certain scenarios, particularly when there are many components or when changes are made frequently. Ultimately, the performance differences between React’s virtual DOM and Angular’s change detection depend on the specific requirements and characteristics of the application being built.
So what? Is more options a problem?
Well no, however, the ever-evolving landscape of front-end development can be overwhelming for developers. The plethora of frameworks, libraries, and tools can lead to disorganization, confusion, and bloat, making it difficult for developers to create optimized and efficient code.
Along with the main 3, there are several technologies built either as an alternative or on top of these main technologies.
Some of the competitors: Svelte, Solid, Emberjs, Preact
All of the mentioned technologies are client-side rendering. This means the client-side app is a stand-alone project that is sent to the client as mostly empty HTML and to show the page content another request is made to the server serving the site and the server sends the client Javascript bundles that generate and fill in the HTML content.
Why?
Well the main benefits are:
Improved interactivity: With this method, it is easier to create highly dynamic sites without reloading the page.
Faster initial load times: Since the main bottleneck for web apps is network latency it just takes less time to send the client an empty HTML file, a CSS file, and a Javascript bundle that will fill out the page than sending a request to the server, waiting for the server to populate the page and then sending the big bundle over the internet to the client.
Improved scalability: It’s easier to maintain since the app is separated from the backend which in and of itself can be a complex codebase so adding “unrelated” code on top of it can complicate things.
So what are some of the drawbacks?
First, the fact that the app is rendered on the client side means the client machine is tasked with This can be resource intensive. It is noticeable if the client is on a low-end machine.
Second, a JavaScript dependency. Client-side rendering requires JavaScript to be enabled on the client side, which means that users who have disabled JavaScript in their browsers will not be able to use the application.
Another drawback is SEO. Since the app is just an empty HTML file when a crawler from let’s say Google requests the page to scrape and analyze the content in order to rank it there is nothing to analyze.
So what then?
The current best option would be hybrid options or specialized tools for the use case. What do I mean by that? Using the most appropriate tool for the job.
What are the most effective frontend development tools
Next.js
Next.js is a popular open-source framework for building server-side rendering (SSR) React applications. Along with SSR, it can also be used for static site generation and client-side rendering.
Using this react framework you can generate static pages on build time for the pages where the content doesn’t change. You can also render pages on the server if the data is dynamic. When delivered to the client it additionally has all of the client-side capabilities to dynamically re-render the page like any other client-side framework. This also means SEO optimization is not as big a concern since the page is rendered on the server and crawlers can get the full page content on request.
Next.js is also a server since it generates and renders pages and renders them for user requests. This means it can behave like a normal server, and it has a built-in Nodejs (express-like) API to handle REST requests. It is minimal but it can be extended to cover a surprising amount of use cases.
Astro
Astro is a relatively new open-source framework for building modern web applications using server-side rendering (SSR) and static site generation (SSG) techniques. It is flexible and can be used with various web technologies, including React, Vue, Svelte, and more.
Like Next.js, Astro supports server-side rendering, which allows better SEO optimization by providing search engines with fully rendered HTML pages. Astro’s performance optimization features make it an excellent choice for building fast and efficient e-commerce websites that need to handle large amounts of data and traffic.
Both can be used for similar projects but they have different approaches to generating pages. The choice between the two frameworks ultimately depends on the specific needs of the project and the preferences of the development team.
Astro may be a newcomer, but it is already very popular in the web development community, which is growing fast.
Gatsby
Gatsby is another popular framework for building modern web applications, and like Next.js and Astro, it offers many performance optimization features.
Gatsby achieves high performance through static site generation (SSG), which pre-renders pages at build time and serves them as static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This approach can significantly improve page load times and reduce server load since pages can be served directly from a content delivery network (CDN) without server-side rendering.
Gatsby is older and is not as popular and depending on who you ask an obsolete way of solving the problem of server-side generation (SSR) and static site generation (SSG), tho this may be a symptom of the JavaScript community being all too eager to replace the current standard way of doing things and supporting the new kid on the block without any technical reason to do so.
The JavaScript ecosystem is notorious for rapid releases of updated frameworks and libraries that solve the same issue in a different way. This is true regardless of whether it is necessary or not. After all, sometimes it feels like there is another React killer every month. And yet we still keep coming back for more!
Recommended ➜ Read about web 3.0 mindset changes..
Wrap-up
Ultimately, frontend development has become an essential aspect of creating interactive and dynamic websites and applications. The three biggest players in the modern frontend ecosystem are React, Vue, and Angular, all of which offer different approaches to rendering page views. As far as modern web development tools go, Next.js, Astro, and Gatsby are all excellent options that can be chosen from among the many options available.
While the plethora of frameworks, libraries, and tools available can lead to confusion, and bloat, it also offers developers many options to choose from. However, the choice of the most effective frontend development tool depends on the specific requirements and characteristics of the application being built. Hybrid options or specialized tools for the use case are currently the best option. As frontend development continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how new technologies and frameworks emerge to address the challenges and opportunities of creating engaging and interactive user interfaces.
Is your next project requiring front-end development support? If so, do you have any questions? Lumen Spei is here for you. Let’s talk about your project and see where we can go from there!
