13.03.2019 / IT technology

What is Vue.js and why you need to use it?

Vue.js is one of the three most popular JavaScript frameworks. Although it’s not particularly appreciated by large companies, 130 thousand stars on GitHub prove that it is preferred and liked by independent programmers.

Vue.js is a framework used to build dynamic user interfaces. It is used to create both advanced internet and mobile applications. Alongside React and Angular, it is one of the most-used frameworks, but unlike the other two, Vue was created by a programmer and former Google employee Evan You. The fact that Vue is not supported by a huge company, like Facebook and Google in the case of React.js and Angular, means that large companies decide to use other frameworks. But its ever-growing popularity is evidently changing it.

Advantages of the Vue.js framework

Vue is great for both large and small projects. It perfectly combines the best features of two competitors React and Angular. As React, it is based on components and one-sided data flow, and similarly to Angular, it has simple templates with good syntax. Vue does not need an environment configuration, although for larger projects it is necessary to install additional components that can be reused in many places. For communication between components, a vuex is used, the library that manages a large amount of data at the same time.

Vue offers very detailed documentation, which is praised by developers around the world. One of the advantages is its low entry barrier. Developers do not need to have advanced knowledge of frontend technologies, such as webpack or the ES6 JavaScript standard. They simply need to add the script with the Vue library code to an HTML file. Such configuration is enough to learn the basics. However, Vue is still a JavaScript framework, which is quite a difficult programming language to learn.

However, if you want to build larger applications, it is recommended to use vue-cli, which offers the creation of a basic project with ready-made packages, such as vue-router, vuex, typescript, eslint, etc. Normally, setting up a simple project would take many hours and thanks to cli you can do it much faster.

Few Vue disadvantages

A possible disadvantage of Vue is its flexibility. Of course, for some people flexibility is beneficial, however when working on a larger project with many developers involved it can be problematic. Excessive flexibility can lead to a lot of errors in the code, which then delays the project and increases its cost.

Also, Vue is a relatively new framework. Although it is growing fast, its community is much smaller compared to its competitors. Therefore, larger companies do not want to implement new tools that are not supported by a large company and which do not have such backing as others.

In spite of this, developers are more and more often choosing to switch to the Vue, as a result of which begins to catch up Angular in popularity. At the same time, the more specialists join the community, the bigger the database of created solutions becomes.

 

Author: Damian Kałwik, programmer