What is the best alternative to Ember.js?

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score 308 · Answer 1

Vue.js

Top Pro

Can be used with any front-end stack

Vue can easily be integrated with other front-end libraries. This makes it an extremely versatile tool and it's easy to fix its shortcomings or missing features by just plugging in another library. See More

Top Con

Poor typescript support

Very basic typescript support. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Vue.js weighs in at 16kb min+gzip. See More

Top Pro

Single file component

Very useful. See More

Top Pro

Supports inline templating

Although you can build components in JavaScript files, you can also use inline handlebars-like templating in your HTML views where simplicity is often a more sane choice. See More

Top Pro

Responsive server-side rendering

Since most of the mainstream server-side rendering implementations are synchronous, they can block the server's event loop when the application is complex. Vue implements streaming server-side rendering, which allows you to render your component, get a readable stream and directly pipe that to the HTTP response. This allows you to have a responsive server and decreases the time your users have to wait before they get your rendered content. See More

Top Pro

Can be made even lighter

Since the template-to-virtual-DOM and compiler can be separated, you can compile the templates in your machine and then deploying only the interpreter which is 12KB minified and gzipped. See More

Top Pro

Support for both templates and JSX

You can choose to use either a templating language, or if you feel it's necessary to drop on a lower virtual-dom level, you can use JSX. This is simply done by replacing the template option with a render function. Or alternatively, you can embed functions inside templates by using the <render> tag. See More

Top Pro

Vuex store, events system

Top Pro

Reactivity system

Top Pro

CLI and Webpack integration

Top Pro

SEO friendly

Starting with Vue 2.0, Vue supports server-side rendering. This helps with SEO a lot, since the views are rendered directly on the server, which are indexed by search engines. See More

Top Pro

VueRouter

Specs

GZipped size:~30KB

Repository:https://github.com/vuejs/vue

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308 78

score 153 · Answer 2

React

Top Pro

Easy to reuse components

Since every single UI component is created independently in JavaScript, it becomes very easy to reuse them throughout your app without having to re-write them. See More

Top Con

Heavy on memory

React's virtual DOM is fast, but it requires storing elements in the virtual and real DOM increasing memory usage for the page. This can be a real problem for single-page webapps designed to be left running in the background. See More

Top Pro

Server side rendering

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser. This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines. See More

Top Con

Verbose

React gets a little verbose as applications get more complicated with more components. It's simply not as straightforward as simply writing HTML and JavaScript would be. See More

Top Pro

Virtual DOM support

Instead of relying on the DOM, React implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself. See More

Top Con

Not a complete solution

React does not do everything for the developer, it's merely a tool for building the UI of a web app. It does not have support for routing or models, at least not out of the box. While some missing features can be added through libraries, to start using React and use it in production, you still would need to have experience, or at least a good grasp on what the best libraries to use would be. See More

Top Pro

One-way data flow

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized. See More

Top Con

Large file size

React's react.min.js is 145.5KB in size. It's much larger than some other libraries that offer roughly the same features and it's almost the same size as some MV* frameworks such as Angular or Ember that offer more features out of the box. Although, it should be mentioned that sometimes having a smaller library may force developers to reinvent the wheel and write inefficient implementations on features that React already has. Ending up with a larger application that's harder to maintain and/or that has bad performance. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming style leads to less buggy UIs

Top Con

Renders too frequently

Top Pro

Easy to write tests

Since React's virtual DOM system is implemented completely in JavaScript, it's very easy to write UI test cases. See More

Top Con

You have to learn a new syntax

Requires learning a custom syntax, JSX, that has some gotchas and introduce complexity, a steeper learning curve, and incompatibility with other tools. Though you can opt out from JSX and use vanilla JS instead. But that is not recommended since it adds a lot of unneeded complexity which JSX tries to avoid. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with different libraries

ReactJS can be used independently as the only library for building the front-end, or it can be used alongside JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, or even Angular. See More

Top Con

Template(view) mixed into code

Top Pro

Supported by Facebook and Instagram

React is built by Facebook engineers initially to be used only for their inner projects especially to solve the problem of building large complex applications with constantly changing data. See More

Top Con

No support for legacy browsers

React has recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 8. While the library may still work on IE8, issues that affect only IE8 will not be prioritized and/or solved. See More

Top Pro

Template engine independent

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory. See More

Top Pro

Good debugging tools

React has an official Chrome Extension which is used as a developing and debugging tool. It can be used to quickly and painlessly debug your application or view the whole application structure as it's rendered. See More

Top Pro

Flux architecture pattern

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language. One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly. With React this is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided. See More

Top Pro

Extensive SVG support

Since React v0.15, SVG is fully supported. React supports all SVG attributes that are recognized by today's browsers. See More

Top Pro

Keep control over your app's logic

React is just a view library, so you still have (almost) full control over how your app behaves. See More

Top Pro

Supported by ClojureScript libraries

Reagent, Om, Rum, etc. See More

Top Pro

Tested on Facebook itself

React is used on one of the most visited websites on the planet, Facebook. With stellar results and with millions of people experiencing it every day. See More

Specs

GZipped size:45K

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153 63

score 55 · Answer 3

Angular

Top Pro

Support for a composable component oriented architecture with directives

Angular uses the existing HTML structure and builds on top of it instead of requiring you to learn a new templating language. Because it's just vanilla HTML, it is more familiar, and easier for beginners to learn. Directives let Angular know which HTML elements are under its control, and how to use them. Being directly on the HTML it's more transparent what's going on, and it's possible to get a good idea of what the page is doing just by looking at the template. Also, it makes embedding possible, as you could have an angular app within an existing site so you don't have to rewrite everything at once. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Angular isn't a simple framework, and because much of the magic goes on behind the scenes, it isn't easy to go from simply using the framework to being able to actually change how it works and extend it. See More

Top Pro

Huge ecosystem of third party components

Angular is an extremely popular JavaScript framework. Because of this, developers have developed a myriad of components which can be downloaded and integrated into any Angular application. See More

Top Con

It is almost mandatory to use Typescript

Although ES standard can be used, most of the documentation and resources are with Typescript. See More

Top Pro

Huge community that is quickly growing

Angular has the largest community out of all Javascript MV* frameworks and there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there for new and old users alike. See More

Top Con

Difficult to use for isomorphic apps that render the initial template on the server in a performant way. Non issue for enterprise apps.

Top Pro

Easy and straightforward data-binding

Data bindings are done on the DOM, which allows you to easily sync data between various parts of the DOM in a very succint matter. <body ng-app> <span>Insert your name:</span> <input type="text" ng-model="user.name" /> <h3>Echo: {{user.name}}</h3> </body> This snippet shows how the model attribute "name" is easily bound across different parts of the DOM without having to set up any extra boilerplate. See More

Top Con

Explicit configuration

Users will usually need to specify stuff that is very obvious (template location, providers etc. ). See More

Top Pro

Provides dependency injection

With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it. This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services. It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start. See More

Top Con

Two-way data binding is often considered an anti-pattern

Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Angular model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed. This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code. See More

Top Pro

All best practices

Top Con

HTML template does not comply to standards

Attributes are case-sensitive, which is against the HTML standards. See More

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55 28

score 61 · Answer 4

Polymer

Top Pro

Based on web components

Web Components are a collection of specifications released by W3C as a way to reduce the complexity of web apps by creating reusable components. Browser support is currently poor for web components, however Polymer is developed to make web components compatible with modern browsers. See More

Top Con

No server-side rendering

Polymer does not support server-side rendering. This results in higher loading times, more HTTP requests and it's not very SEO friendly, since search engines have no way of indexing a page if it's not rendered in the server. See More

Top Pro

Various basic components

It provides a base component. See More

Top Pro

HTML markup is not string

HTML markup as it can be a non-string. See More

Top Pro

CSS is easy to apply

CSS can be applied far more comfortably than React. See More

Top Pro

Flex layout components

It provides Flex layout components. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

Polymer guides you as with tools (cli, build environment, app templates,..) as with complimentary documentation on all phases of app development from creation of app as progresive web app to production deployment instructions. As Polymer is standards based, the whole community around those standards also helping in documentation and support. See More

Top Pro

Complete web app stack support

Full app stack from data tier to routing, progressive web app, responsive layouts makes no need to seek outside of Polymer ecosystem for application features. In addition to waste set of mature web components in Polymer Elements along with Vaadin Elements there are thousands of web components in the wild comparable to jQuery plugins set. See More

Top Pro

API is easy to understand, based on standard

The Polymer APIs are split on application layers and follow standards on all possible ways: Web Components, CSS variables, async API via Promises and so on. See More

Top Pro

Excellent routing

The router is embedded into CLI for project creation and covers as web as Progressive web app, also fused with Polymer layouts out of the box. The shop template for CLI has a complete solution including the routing. See More

Top Pro

No need for special debugging tools

The presence od specialized debugging tools are advertised by competitors. The all features of web components are natively supported by browser embedded development tools. See More

Specs

v1.0 GZipped size:53K

v2.0 GZipped size (Safari):13K

v2.0 GZipped size (Chrome):10K

v2.0 GZipped size (Edge):36K

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61 15

score 147 · Answer 5

Aurelia

Top Pro

Out of the box Typescript support

Full support for Typescript built in See More

Top Con

Needs more support from the community

It would be great to have a lot of plugins made by the community, or video tutorials from experiences when using it. Hopefully in the near term future. See More

Top Pro

Conventions over configurations

Configured to give you the most common use cases by convention, which means you only need to change the default configuration for edge cases. This means that for normal cases far less boiler plate code has to be written. See More

Top Con

No big success stories yet

There are no notable big web products build with aurelia yet See More

Top Pro

Standards compliant

Aurelia developers always try to keep within existing and emerging Web Standards, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in web development. See More

Top Con

Two-way data binding is often considered an anti-pattern

Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Angular model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed. This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code. See More

Top Pro

Good binding system

Clear, intuitive and HTML/SVG compliant binding syntax. Examples: Default binding => value.bind One Way binding => value.one-way Two Way binding => value.two-way One Time binding => value.one-time See More

Top Pro

Out of the box ES6 support

Aurelia includes native support for ES6 and even comes with a Gulpfile which helps with transpiling ES6 code to ES5. See More

Top Pro

Allows developers to build their application however they want

Aurelia is extremely unopinionated and was designed to be highly modular. This gives the developer the freedom to develop their application however they want, without forcing them in paradigms or rules predefined by the framework. Likewise, any of the individual components can be swapped out if so desired. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Learning aurelia basically means learning EcmaScript and HTML, since aurelia is designed for standards compliance. Also, aurelia embraces upcoming ES language features by convention, such as ES class decorators for dependency injection, encouraging clean architecture and future-proof code. See More

Top Pro

Variable binding helps with self-documenting the code

The syntax used to bind variables within the application class is very similar to Javascript itself. You can specify the type of the binding you are using explicitly, which practically self-documents your code and makes it easy to understand whether a value is one-way or two-way binded. See More

Top Pro

Agnostic code

Most of the code you write is Aurelia-agnostic. That way you can easily test it, switch to another implementation and make it look clean (business oriented). Even the HTML. See More

Top Pro

Structure

Aurelia.js consists of modules that can be used as a full framework or separately. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

One of the most crucial pieces of any new technology or framework is the documentation. At present even though Aurelia is pre-beta, the documentation is pretty complete. There are code examples missing and whatnot, but for the most part it is concise and makes the main parts of the application easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Full commercial support

Aurelia is officially backed by Durandal Inc. and has commercial and enterprise support is available. See More

Top Pro

Data binding choices with sane defaults

Aurelia defaults to one-way data binding, alining with conventional wisdom. However, there are times when two-way data binding proves useful, such as binding an input widget with a view-model. Aurelia makes two-way data binding available to developers and uses it by convention when appropriate. See More

Top Pro

Powerful helper CLI available

https://github.com/aurelia/cli The CLI helps rapid creation of projects with generators, building, deploying and hot reloads. Webpack should be coming soon. See More

Top Pro

Plays well with other frameworks

Aurelia can be used alongside of React and Polymer, since it is designed for interoperability. In practice, this means Aurelia developers can use React components by including an Aurelia custom element: https://github.com/Vheissu/aurelia-react-example/blob/master/README.md It also works well with Polymer, since they are both based on the WebComponents standards: http://aurelia.io/hub.html#/doc/article/aurelia/framework/latest/integrating-with-polymer See More

Top Pro

Growing community

The Aurelia community is growing at a great pace. Still doesn’t rival the big players line Angular or React, but the answer to an Aurelia issue is a quick question away on their Discourse. See More

Specs

GZipped size:~67kB

Minified size:~237K

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147 24

score 6 · Answer 6

Sencha Ext JS

Top Pro

Comprehensive documentation

The Sencha documentation is comprehensive, with detailed documentation and a number of examples displaying the various widgets, tools and themes. See More

Top Con

Sencha CMD is bloated and frustrating to work with

To do any meaningful development, you are stuck with CMD. There is a gulp task that will handle the JS concatenation, but there is nothing outside of CMD that can handle theming in their ecosystem. In addition, CMD is based on Java, and is very heavy to run (600MB+ on Windows 10 to watch for changes in the application and recompile). See More

Top Pro

Supports MVC and MVVM development

Top Con

Sencha CMD (their CLI) is under documented, and out of date

Their latest release of CMD changed some configuration locations, but the documentation was not updated to reflect this. There is no reference guide on the json configuration files, other than the (unfortunate use of) comments in the generated json files. See More

Top Pro

Supports Web and Mobile deployment out of the one framework or codebase

Top Con

They use proprietary extensions to SASS, making it incompatible with anything but their Fashion processor

On the plus side, you do not have to install ruby alongside CMD for more recent versions of ExtJS. However, their Fashion processor seems to only be available through CMD. See More

Top Pro

Support for easy theming of applications

Top Con

Too often breaking changes between versions. They have little concept of backwards compatibility

Compounded by the fact that there are now two "toolkits" in the same "version" of ExtJS, with certain components not existing in one vs the other. See More

Top Pro

Visual Design tool available

The Sencha Architect product allows you to visually build your application, or rapidly prototype a system. See More

Top Con

The IDE tools are not sold separately - you must purchase the appropriate license pack

You get all the IDE plugins, even if you only need one. They should offer sell them individually, or continue to bundle them with a dev license pack. See More

Top Pro

IDE Plugins available

A number of plugins are available for some of the commonly used IDEs (eg: JetBrains, Eclipse, Visual Studio), providing templates, refactoring support, hinting and code completion/generation, as well as management of includes and other time-saving features. See More

Top Con

Difficult to integrate with 3rd party software

Any third party library you wish to include has to be wrapped in some sort of component adapter. You have to do a lot of tweaking to get the build process right if you want the 3rd party lib to be bundled into your application in the right order. See More

Top Pro

Charting package included

Top Con

Can be expensive

The framework is a commercial package, and the recent decision to start with a minimum of 5 users may rule out smaller developer teams or startups. Recently, they have started a program that allow essentially what are contractors to purchase single licenses, but not individual, independent developers. See More

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6 2

score 67 · Answer 7

Backbone

Top Con

Requires more coding compared to other frameworks

Because many features are not provided out of the box, you either have to write more base class code to get those features, or find a plugin that provides them in a way you like. It does not provide much structure either, things like memory management must be kept in mind by the developer, also the lack of view lifecycle management makes state changes prone to memory leaks. See More

Top Pro

Gives you the freedom to implement views however you want

A lightweight view class is provided but there is no default templating method implemented. Because views are minimal it allows for much more freedom to implement views however you would like, and because of this freedom it's possible to write views to more uniquely adapt to a problem. User interactions are done within an events object that allows these interactions to be segregated from the rest of the view code which makes the behavioral aspect of the view easier to read and manage. See More

Top Con

Can easily lead you to spaghetti code

Heavy event-binding can lead to unmanageable spaghetti mess. BB tempts users to overuse it for no reason. See More

Top Pro

Can be combined with any library you want

Backbone can be combined with any library of your choosing, giving you the ultimate flexibility in creating customized solutions for unique projects. Even the only two backbone requirements, jQuery and underscore can be replaced with equivalent libraries like zepto or lo-dash. See More

Top Con

No data binding

Backbone does not have data binding support. However, there are some libraries that can be implemented in order to have data binding in Backbone. Such as Epoxy See More

Top Pro

Large community

Backbone has existed longer than most frameworks, and has a large following of users and projects using it as a framework. See More

Top Pro

You can call underscore.js methods directly on Backbone objects

Backbone collections and models are extended by underscore.js method allowing you to call underscore methods directly on the Backbone objects. See More

Top Pro

Easy to interface with the API

Backbone provides Model and Collection classes that provide strong analogs to restful resources. These strong analogs allow you to interface more naturally with the API, and makes it easier to write custom behaviors for more complicated API interactions. Collections provide a variety of powerful manipulation methods that are integrated from the underscore library, that allow you to manipulate, sort, and filter collection data easily. See More

Top Pro

Easy to implement complex user interaction

Because all the state is managed by Models and Controllers, and they are extendable objects, you can isolate all the state logic onto those objects allowing the rest of the application to not worry about it. The app is simplified to just taking in input to modify the Models and Controllers, and updating the views to reflect them, but none of the state needs to be a concern outside of the Model and Controller classes. See More

Top Pro

Doesn’t force you into a particular coding style or paradigm

There is no “magic” happening below the surface: the source code is clear, readable and well commented. Backbone is also “lightweight” in the sense that it doesn’t require a ton of buy-in to use. It can be easily integrated into an existing page, and you can choose to only use certain components of the library (Views without Models or Collections, for example). While there are many frameworks that seem to be faster to get started with, Backbone’s lack of surprises, clear documentation, speed & flexibility make it a good fit for all types of apps. See More

Top Pro

Extendable with plugins

Because Backbone is so simple, and the different components are very well isolated, it is very easy to extend the functionality of Backbone. If you're writing your own extended code it's easy to keep it separated out, and share with the community. The community also has many plugins already available, which you can pick and choose to use to fit your programming style. See More

Top Pro

Easy to abstract interaction

All Backbone classes extend an events class that allows for listening and triggering functionality. Because all classes implement events by default it is easier to provide asynchronous communication between objects, and it allows better abstraction of interaction so the event emitting object does not need to know the structure or existence of the receiving object. See More

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67 18

score 46 · Answer 8

Marko

Top Pro

Extremely fast

Marko consistently outperforms other alternatives in code benchmarks, both on rendering speed and compilation time. See More

Top Con

Very opinionated and not customizable enough

Some custom use cases are not possible. For example, trying to build an AMP page using Marko can be very challenging (special style tag requirements are hard to work with, also, Marko by default inserts a script tag into the rendered output html which is invalid in AMP and needs to be manually removed, etc..) See More

Top Pro

Custom tags

Custom tags provide a simple mechanism for embedding more complex components into a template by extending the HTML grammar with support for new tags. For example: <div> <say-hello name="World"/> </div> Custom tags are easy to create since they just map to a JavaScript "renderer" function as shown below: module.exports = function sayHelloRenderer(input, out) { out.write('Hello ' + input.name + '!'); } Custom tags support nested content: <fancy-overlay title="My Title"> This will be the body content of the overlay </fancy-overlay> Custom tags can also have parent/child relationships to support more complex use cases such a "tabs" component with nested "tab" components: <fancy-tabs> <fancy-tabs:tab label="Home"> Content for Home </fancy-tabs:tab> <fancy-tabs:tab label="Profile"> Content for Profile </fancy-tabs:tab> <fancy-tabs:tab label="Messages"> Content for Messages </fancy-tabs:tab> </fancy-tabs> See More

Top Pro

Streaming

Streaming allows progressive HTML rendering and reduces time to first byte. See More

Top Pro

Marko Widgets

Marko Widgets allows UI components (rendering + behavior) to be built using Marko. See More

Top Pro

Server-side rendering

Marko supports both server-side and client-side rendering. See More

Top Pro

Simple and readable syntax

Marko has a HTML-like syntax which should be easy to read and understand for everyone who has even minimal experience in web development. See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous rendering

Marko makes additional asynchronous calls after the view rendering has begun. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight runtime (~4 KB gzip)

Top Pro

Documentation is well maintained and helpful

The documentation is extensive and very helpful. It also contains several sample applications which are very useful. See More

Top Pro

Compiled templates are readable CommonJS modules

Avoids ugly globals and "named" templates. var template = require('./template.marko'); var html = template.renderSync({name: 'Frank'}); See More

Top Pro

Small compiled templates

Marko's compiled templates are usually very small, as proven by benchmarks. See More

Top Pro

Short learning curve

It is easy to get up to speed and understand what is going on in a very short period of time. See More

Top Pro

Allows JavaScript expressions

JavaScript expressions can be executed inside the templates. See More

Top Pro

Friendly compile-time error messages

Error messages come in an easy to read and friendly format, with valid stack traces and file formats of the file(s) which brought the error(s). See More

Top Pro

Lots of tests

To prevent regressions, Marko includes a full suite of tests. The testing harness renders a collection of templates and does an exact string comparison to make sure that the tests rendered exactly as expected. There are also API tests, and negative tests to make sure that errors are reported in a friendly way. To run tests: git clone https://github.com/marko-js/marko cd marko npm install npm test See More

Top Pro

Concise and Mixed syntax

The Concise syntax type lets you write Marko with a Jade-like indentation based syntax, and the Mixed mode lets you combine in regular HTML-style syntax. See More

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with express.js

Easy Integration with Express and Node See More

Top Pro

Server and client logic can easily be expressed within the same template

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46 14

score 16 · Answer 9

Mustache.js

Top Con

Basic tasks are difficult

Mustache js's attempts at making some things simple makes them so easy that they're almost difficult. That is the case with some basic tasks like figuring out how to apply css to shade odd/even rows on your template based content. See More

Top Pro

Clean syntax

Mustache provides you with a clean and easy to understand syntax. Having a syntax that is readable is always a huge plus, since this means easier maintenance and code readability in the future. See More

Top Con

Bested by Handlebars in many ways

Handlebars being an extension of Mustache bests it in both speed and power. It adds additional features to Mustache which make writing templates easier and faster. Benchmarks have also shown that Precompiled Handlebars renders in about half the time of Mustache and the rewritten Handlebars (current version) is 5 to 7 times faster than Mustache. See More

Top Pro

Available in lots of languages

Available in a wide variety of languages including Ruby, JavaScript, Python, C++, Scala, Go, Julia, Swift and more. See the full list here. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Mustache is easy to deliver. If you need more features down the road, you can switch to handlebars, which is a superset of Mustache. See More

Top Pro

Server side support

Mustache.js has multi-language server side support, which essentially means you can use mustache based templates on languages other than javascript. (like if your server-side was built on Java you could still use Mustache.js) See More

Top Pro

Logic-less

By design logic-less templates force you to separate concerns thus helping you avoid future problems with refactoring. It also allow templates to be used with multiple programming languages without changes. See More

Top Pro

Can be compiled

Mustache templates can be compiled to JS files, so that they can be directly loaded. See More

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16 6

score 15 · Answer 10

ExtJS

Top Pro

Well documented

ExtJS' documentation is very detailed and helpful. All concepts and parts of the framework are thoroughly explained. See More

Top Con

Large footprint

The library is almost 500Kb in size hence significantly affects your page load time. See More

Top Pro

Easy reusability of code

By using the packages and custom components, code can be reused very simply. See More

Top Con

Completely unreliable with regard to licensing and pricing

That ExtJs is expensive is not the problem, but what they did is started completely free, then switched the licensing model when they had profited from the community. Also, they suddenly switched from a single user license to a minimum of 5 users. See More

Top Pro

Provides built in support for UI widgets

Huge amount of widgets available, also easy to build custom widgets by extending the available components. See More

Top Con

Expensive licensing

ExtJS is free for use in open source projects, but you have to use the unstable version which is riddled with bugs. Furthermore, to build a project (even if it's open source), you have to buy their proprietary tools. For commercial projects, it costs $665 for a license. See More

Top Pro

Professional support available

If you buy a license you can get professional support and premium forums. Support has short contact times and solutions are of great value. See More

Top Con

No real support

You only get a limited premium questions that could be answered via the support and if the issue is too large then you might lose all your credits (it has a credit system for support) in one question. In addition the replies in premium forum are sometimes less thought of than you would get in stackoverflow. See More

Top Pro

IDE plugins available

Plugins are available for JetBrains, Eclipse and Visual Studio. See More

Top Con

License

Ext-JS is not for free, it comes with a license. See More

Top Pro

Forum support

Forum support is available. See More

Top Con

Lots of bugs

The community is very small and this is because the licencing is very expensive. Therefore not many people to test the framework and give feedback in order to fix. They try to do everything in house which means that a small company (linkedin shows about 100 employees) tries to imitate something very large. The scaling problems lead to lots of bugs and instability. See More

Top Pro

Flat learning curve

Anyone with basic JavaScript knowledge can start using this framework. See More

Top Con

No web-workers

ExtJS does not take into account the asynchronous nature of todays web browsers where you can do heavy stuff on the background. See More

Top Pro

Excellent design tools

Eg: Sencha Architect. See More

Top Con

Tooling is poor

They had a GUI architect tool, but that tool never was up to date with the current framework version. Now they even seem to have abandoned the whole architect app. Also, to build a ExtJs app you have to use their tool (and then you have to pay, from that moment ExtJs is no longer GPL). But this tool also has lots of bugs. See More

Top Pro

Developer friendly integrated tools

Sencha Cmd, Sencha Inspector and some IDE plugins etc., are the tools which helps developers to speed up their development. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

ExtJs is a very opinionated framework. You have to do it the ExtJs way or it's the highway. So, a lot of time, things in your own opinion doesn't make sense or don't work in the way you expect it. See More

Top Con

Quantity yes, quality no

There is a large amount of source code that can be useful and indeed all the samples works flawlessly. When you try to get into more complex scenarios you will find yourself in situations where things just do not work as expected. You will have to do manual work. See More

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15 13

score 9 · Answer 11

CanJS

Top Pro

Great browser support

CanJS supports all modern browsers and IE9+. See More

Top Pro

CanJS can be used with any other library

CanJS is a collection of individual libraries, each separately available as npm packages. It's easy to use just what you need. See More

Top Pro

Real time support

CanJS's model layer (can-connect), support real-time updates to lists without adding any additional code. See More

9 0

score 7 · Answer 12

w2ui

Top Pro

Lots of components/widgets

Library contains UI components like Datagrids, Forms, Tabs, SideBars, Toolbars and more See More

Top Pro

Small library size

Only two files need to be included 1 .css and 1 .js, together they are only 365 kb. regarding to amount of components it is very small. See More

Top Pro

Easy and clean API

any component is well documented and have an easy api to access validation, dataloading and handling user events. See More

7 0

score 5 · Answer 13

CanJS

Top Con

Hard to find resources outside of the official ones

Since CanJS is not very popular, it can be hard to find learning resources, tutorials, guides or any other resource that may help development. See More

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Update of single element, no diff like react. See More

Top Pro

Compact and easy syntax

CanJS has an easy to learn syntax. See More

5 0

score 4 · Answer 14

Blocks.js

Top Pro

Small footprint

Blocks.js is just 16.5KB minified and gzipped. So it's pretty small. See More

Top Con

Relatively new

Blocks.js is a relatively new library. It doesn't have much support and there re not many people who use it. So if you run into any problems it would be hard to get solutions. See More

Top Pro

Modular structure

Apps developed with blocks.js are modular in structure and make use of reusable objects. This makes these applications very maintainable. See More

Specs

GZipped size:16.5K

4 0

score 14 · Answer 15

Webix

Top Pro

Extremely simple to implement.

To get started is extremely simple. It has a low learning curve. See More

Top Con

Not very popular

Not really a reason to not recommend it. But it has still a small user base. It deserves a lot more attention. See More

Top Pro

Great support from the webix team

The company behind webix is really quick in answering any questions you have on their forum or via email. See More

Top Con

Not modular

The library is not modular (except for some additional more complex widgets). If you only need a few widgets, you still need to include the entire library. See More

Top Pro

A lot of widgets

Webix is one of the most extensive UI component libraries, second only to Sencha ExtJS. Not only considering the number of widgets, but also the API methods for manipulating these widgets. See More

Top Con

Commercial license

It's not free for commercial applications. See More

Top Pro

Webix Jet

The webix Jet library adds all the required features for SPA development (routing, template loading, ...) See More

Top Pro

Seems to be quite stable

Even the most complicated GUIs are bug-free most of the time. See More

Top Pro

Views can be constructed using JavaScript without HTML

The most common way of working with webix is to create a JSON configuration of your view in JavaScript. When you use TypeScript, you get complete typechecking and intellisense in your IDE. See More

Top Pro

Awesome responsive material skins

Great design and icons pack. See More

Top Pro

Mature project

Regular updates and releases. See More

Specs

Site:webix.com

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14 1

score 13 · Answer 16

Inferno

Top Pro

Pretty light-weight

Inferno weighs in at 9kb gzipped, which is light-weight. See More

Top Con

Some React components may not work with Inferno

Inferno and React have different public and private APIs. If 3rd party components use a private API then it's almost certainly going to break when you use it with Inferno. Once React Fiber is implemented, even libraries that are currently working will break and will not be supported by Inferno. See More

Top Pro

Fast performance

Inferno is one of the fastest UI libraries around and widely considered the fastest. See More

Top Con

Not very popular

Which can hinder one's opinion of its future, but the future of all "frameworks" is to break things into smaller pieces, so inferno very well might get used by the big names in the future. See More

Top Pro

Modular

Use it however you want in a framework of your own custom design. When things change in the industry, swap things out instead of being locked in by someone else's design. See More

Top Pro

React compatability

Using the Inferno compatibility package ("inferno-compat"), Inferno can support the vast majority of React codebases. See More

13 1

score 68 · Answer 17

Mithril

Top Pro

Small, easy to learn API

Most other frameworks either offer a huge API to deal with model and view synchronization, or defer to other libraries & plugins to cater for relatively simple use cases. Mithril's API is tiny but complete. The natural reaction is to assume something is missing, but as you build you realise you incredibly fast, powerful and rich applications can be built using nothing but Mithril. See More

Top Con

Small API can make it unsuitable for larger more complex projects

Mithril's small API and small number of functions while helpful for small projects and applications where speed is needed, can add another layer of complexity in larger more complex applications where a more extensive API is needed out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Mithril's loading times are very fast. This is because it's templates are compiled first and then served to the browser and because it uses a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM is a virtual tree containing all the nodes of the real DOM, every time anything changes in the virtual DOM, Mithril does not re-render the entire (real) DOM, instead it just searches and applies the differences. See More

Top Pro

No need to learn another syntax to write views

Most MVC frameworks use HTML templates to render their views. They are good and useful because they are easy to read and understand. But they add more complication to an app because it's practically a new language and syntax that needs to be learned. Mithril argues that separating markup from logic is just a separation of technologies and not concerns, so you can write Mithril views in JavaScript. Writing them in JavaScript also makes it easier to debug them (HTML templates can't be debugged). See More

Top Pro

Familiar to people used to MVC

Doesn't lock you into any complicated conventions or structures, only one function is required to create either a Controller or a View. You're free to implement your architecture exactly as you want, so you can focus on the purpose of MVC, making connections between computer data and stuff in the end user's head. See More

Top Pro

Small size

Weights just 8Kb gzipped and has no dependencies. A reactive stream module can be added for one extra Kb. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Mithril has a large and expansive documentation despite it's relatively small API. Mithril's GitHub repo has more documentation than actual source code. None of that documentation is auto-generated See More

Top Pro

Allows you to choose which JavaScript libraries to integrate in your project

Mithril gives to the developer the flexibility to chose the best JavaScript library to use for a specific task. A huge framework like Angular instead forces you to use their API, which does not necessarily evolve as fast as the JavaScript ecosystem. Therefore you may end up in case when you are stuck using an API which is just not the best in terms of performance See More

Top Pro

Allows a smooth transition from other UI frameworks

One thing you need to start using Mithril is just a DOM node. With Mithril a developer is able to introduce the library step by step. See More

Top Pro

Does not force you into a predefined structure

Mithril's API is pretty small compared to other frameworks. It forces developers to solve problems in JavaScript rather than in Mithril. Other frameworks with massive APIs force you to think in a way that suits the framework. Mithril doesn't do that. See More

Top Pro

Can be used without build systems

It's plain old JavaScript, can be used without webpack, gulp or grunt, just include it into your HTML and start writing your app. See More

Specs

GZipped size:8kb

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68 6

score 9 · Answer 18

Ractive.js

Top Pro

Supports a true templating language

Ractive fully supports a templating language. To be more precise, views are written with a variant of Mustache, which is also extended to support inline JavaScript expressions. Soon it will be able to support other templating languages. See More

Top Con

Ractive's two way binding can be a source of bugs

Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Ractive model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed. This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code. However, this is the default behaviour which can be changed to have one-way data binding. See More

Top Pro

Makes it possible to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion

Ractive has a concept of proxy events, which translate a user action (e.g. a mouseclick) defined via an event directive into an intention (e.g. 'select this option'). This allows you to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion. on-click='activate' with arguments: on-click = 'activate: {{a}}, {{b}}' It's activate (and not click, nor your function name) that is the name of the handler event that will be fired for any registered handlers created via ractive.on('activate', your_handler) ractive.on('activate', your_another_handler) Of course, Ractive also supports method calls like on-click='toggle(foo)' See More

Top Pro

Two-way binding configuration

Two-way binding can be turned off by those that are concerned it may be a source of bugs. See More

Top Pro

Step by step tutorial

They have a great interactive tutorial which makes the learning process easy peasy. You will get into it within a couple of minutes. See More

Top Pro

Virtual DOM

Instead of relying on the DOM, Ractive implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself. See More

Specs

GZipped size:12K

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9 1

score 2 · Answer 19

vash

Top Pro

Plays well with handlebars

Top Pro

Minimal syntax

http://emblemjs.com/syntax/ See More

Top Pro

Helper system

https://github.com/kirbysayshi/vash#helper-system See More

Top Pro

Intelligent code inlining

Vash knows JS. https://github.com/kirbysayshi/vash#advanced-expressions See More

Top Pro

Full power of JS

2 0

score 2 · Answer 20

FLAVE

Top Pro

Syntax Highlighting

Syntax Highlighting extensions for Atom and VSCODE See More

Top Con

Limited support and testing

Top Pro

JavaScript allowed in views

Top Con

No data binding

Flave only generates HTML. See More

Top Pro

Helper functions

Can write pure JavaScript helper functions to include in the view file. See More

Top Pro

Multiple Templates in a single file

Optionally encapsulate views within a class as well as have as many view as you want. See More