What is the best front-end MVC framework in 2015?

04 May 2015 · 4 min read · comments

Before writing my first single-page application (SPA) I’ve spent a lot of time researching all the existing, most popular front-end MVC frameworks. After reading a few posts and comparisons, I decided to learn AngularJS. It seems that right now AngularJS is the most popular framework for writing SPAs.

##AngularJS

AngularJS was the first real front-end framework that I managed to learn. Before it, I was trying to understand Backbone several times, but for some reason it seemed to me too complex. AngularJS was pretty straightforward once I got through it’s official tutorial.

When I learned the principles of AngularJS, I managed to write a small website using it. After some work with AngularJS I realized that the standard modules are not enough for developing a big app. Luckily, there are dozens of great libraries that are extending AngularJS with amazing features. These are the ones that I personally used the most:

• UI Router is an amazing library for routing in an Angular app.
• Angular validation. Angular doesn’t have built in support for forms validation. This library was best that I’ve found, for forms validation in an Angular app.

After using Angular for a few months I recognized many of its stengths and weaknesses.

The stengths are that there are really a lot of packages that can extend Angular with new features. If something should be developed in Angular, probably there is already a package for that on GitHub.

The weaknesses are:

• if there is an error in the code, it is really hard to find it in Angular. Especially if the error is in the view.
• the learning curve is pretty huge.
• the Angular framework is very big. It takes quite a lot of time when an Angular SPA is first opened in the browser.

##What is the future?

I started to search for alternatives. The first alternative that I’ve found was Vue.js. However, after going through it’s guide, I realized that it is quite similar to Angular, so I continued my searches.

After a few days of blog readings I came to the conclusion that the future of web technologies is behind isomorphic JavaScript (JavaScript that can render pages both on the front- and back-end). For this reason, I didn’t even look into frameworks that were not suitable for isomorphic use. IMHO, that kind of frameworks were designed to loose the battle.

Even though Meteor seems to be the best stack for building isomorphic apps up to date, I don’t like it, because it is too monolithic. I like to design my applications as sets of microservices. Meteor doesn’t seem to be designed for such use cases.

##ReactJS and RiotJS

There are many articles in the net about how React is better than Angular. E.g., this is the last one that I was reading. That’s why I started to investigate the concept of ReactJS. After reading through its documentation I realized that:

1. it is cool
2. it is faster than AngularJS templates
3. RiotJS is even faster and smaller than ReactJS

However, React and Riot are just the V from the MVC.

In order to have a complete analogue of AngularJS, React has to be combined with something like Flux for managing data and some other library for routing.

Maybe this makes ReactJS and RiotJS more flexible and gives more freedom to the developers. However, I wouldn’t like to spend days on finding the best building blocks for a React application. And even after finding the building blocks I would have to design a good app structure. Angular has all of this out of the box. Furthermore, there are dozens of ready apps on GitHub, which I can use as examples.

##Mithril

IMHO, Mithril is the best framework that I’ve found so far.

• it is fast and small like RiotJS
• it uses a virtual DOM, so it has an isomorphic potential like React and Riot
• it is an MVC framework like AngularJS
• it describes the views in JS files, so error debugging is easier than in AngularJS

Here is a page that compares Mithril to other frameworks.

Even though Mithril seems to be really cool, it is not as popular as other front-end MVC frameworks. It is hard to find tutorials about it, except the official ones. There are hardly any packages that are extending it.

I think, the future is behind Mithril or something like Mithril, but we are not quite there yet. For now, AngularJS seems to be the safer easier way to go.

Summary

Unfortunately, currently there isn’t a perfect framework for writing single-page apps. Each framework has its strong and weak sides, so the decision has to be made separately for each application developed.