BEST WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORKS IN 2017

With the popularity of web applications growing at an exponential rate, it is very difficult as a developer to determine what is the best web development framework for a web application. Frontend developers used to only need to know HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but it is evident that to survive in a modern web environment, these technologies needed to evolve. It is important to still know the basics as a web developer, but frameworks help developers do a lot of task that would have taken a lot longer to do with pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Frameworks are developed based on the evolution of web capabilities and are dependent on trends that end users expect in their applications. Google’s Progressive Web Application design methodology pushes developers to create fast web applications that work seamlessly across mobile and desktop environments. Frameworks help developers create modern applications efficiently by simplifying the development process. These web development frameworks allow companies to hire efficiently due to the scalable capabilities of web applications using frameworks that eliminate the need for a separate developers for mobile and desktop. We’ve included a very short list of the best frameworks you’ll need to get started on an app quickly with little overhead.

Frontend Frameworks

Creating a great user interface can be done easily using frontend frameworks. Many frontend frameworks require the developer to use common web languages such as HTML, CSS, or Javascript. It is important to understand these core skills before developing with a frontend framework. These frameworks help developers design and build modern and elegant user interfaces for both desktop and mobile browsers.

Angular (2/4)

Angular is a frontend framework designed to be scalable to mobile and desktop environments. Angular.js is technically Angular 1, but the release of Angular 2 drastically changed the syntax and format so many people consider Angular.js and Angular 2+ two different frameworks. With support from Google, Angular is designed to be powerful, efficient, and scalable so developers can easily create desktop applications which work perfectly on mobile as well. Angular requires its developers to have a thorough understanding of Typescript (a superset of Javascript) and a browser’s MVC (model-view-controller), which is a small hurdle for most developers.

React

Although React is a library and not technically a framework, developers will often choose between Angular or React so we decided to include it. React is a Javascript library developed by Facebook used to create responsive web applications. Being a library and not a framework, React has a much smaller footprint than frameworks like Angular. This allows for easy scalability for web applications that are not using a lot of the components that are packaged in a traditional framework. React has an easier learning curve due to its use of Javascript and its small core API. If you plan on making native mobile applications, React Native allows developers to create native mobile applications using Javascript. Although Angular can do this using Ionic, React Native has better performance capabilities in this environment.

Backend

When it comes to deploying your web application, a backend service is needed to provide the core functionality and logic. Currently many web applications are powered by PHP, Python, or Ruby, but this often requires developers to know a different set of languages on the backend and the frontend.

Node.js

Node.js eliminates the need for a developer to know and use multiple programming languages to deploy a web application. As a web developer, Javascript is a must, and Node.js allows developers to use Javascript outside the browser as a backend service. Node.js makes creating APIs and hosting server side content easy with its built in package manager, npm. This package manager consists of countless source libraries to create a lightweight and efficient backend.

There are many ways to create a web application in 2017, but most developers will begin to get lost throughout the process. Choosing either frontend framework in conjunction with Node.js will be straightforward and scalable for small to enterprise projects. Here at Impekable, our developers use both Angular and React depending on our customers’ needs. Our developers enjoy using Node.js in conjunction with either traditional SQL databases or NoSQL databases such as MongoDB. This software development stack is guaranteed to create wonderful web applications as well as remain current and popular as time goes by.

For many people, learning new frameworks and libraries are difficult and time consuming; although the developers created efficient alternatives to the web development process, there is undoubtedly a learning curve. Our developers have practiced for years to master these frameworks to create amazing applications for our clients. These frameworks allow our developers to turn brilliant user interface prototypes into functioning applications in half the time it would take using traditional methods.