How Vue.js compares
This book seeks to outline how to best structure your Vue applications with common development patterns, best practices, and anti-patterns to avoid.
Our journey starts by taking a look at how Vue shapes up to other common projects, and if you measure your frameworks by GitHub stars, Vue is clearly a future winner. According to https://bestof.js.org, in 2017 it currently measures at 114 stars per day in comparison to React's 76 and Angular's 32.
Framework discussion when talking about modern web development technologies is an interesting one. Very rarely do you find a true, unbiased comparison... but that's fine! It's not about which framework or library is best, but rather what's best for your team, project goals, consumers, and hundreds of other variables. As a Vue developer, you're likely a person that wants to build reactive web applications with a simple, easy-to-use API.
It's this adaptable, easy-to-use API that makes Vue pleasant to work with, and perhaps one of the strongest points of Vue is the simple, focused documentation. It has a significantly low barrier to entry: simply add a script file from a CDN, initialize a new Vue instance... and you're away! Granted, there's much more to Vue than this, but in contrast to some fully fledged frameworks such as Angular, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's that easy.
Vue uses templates, declarative bindings, and a component-based architecture to separate concerns and make projects easier to maintain. This becomes especially important when considering which framework to use inside of an enterprise. Usually, this is where projects such Angular shine as it's ability to enforce standards across the entire project.
We've established it's easy to use, but Vue is quite young in comparison to its competitors... how do we know it's not all hype? Is it being used in production by anyone? It certainly is! GitLab recently wrote an article about why they chose Vue.js (https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/20/why-we-chose-vue/), and the primary benefits they cited were ease of use, less code, and fewer assumptions. Other companies such as Laravel, Nintendo, Sainsbury's and Alibaba are all following this route and even companies such as Rever Shine rewrote their web client from Angular 2.x to Vue 2.x (https://medium.com/reverdev/why-we-moved-from-angular-2-to-vue-js-and-why-we-didnt-choose-react-ef807d9f4163).
It's not just public – facing web applications that are taking advantage of Vue.js—NativeScript Sidekick (https://www.nativescript.org/blog/announcing-the-nativescript-sidekick-public-preview), a project focused on improving the NativeScript development experience, is built with Electron and Vue.js.
If we gain some insights from the State of JavaScript survey (http://2016.stateofjs.com/2016/frontend/) by Sacha Greif (https://twitter.com/SachaGreif) and Michael Rambeau (http://michaelrambeau.com/), we can see that a whopping 89% of people used Vue before and want to use it again. Other libraries such as React have similar satisfaction rates at 92%, but Angular 2 and onwards didn't see anywhere near as much love, with 65% wanting to use it again:
What other options are available to us as frontend developers? How do they shape up to Vue? Let's start with React.