What You Should Consider When Picking Your JavaScript Framework
Are you considering which JavaScript framework to use on a project? There are a lot of choices out there. So how do you know which to choose? Whether or not you should go with what's trendy is not the only consideration you should have. Not every trend is a good fit for everyone and every situation. React may work for your former employer and Angular might be a good fit for your friend's startup while Vue.js may have worked well on your last project. What about this time?
Here are our top (4) recommendations of what questions to ask yourself and think about when you have a choice in selecting your next framework:
1) What does your team have familiarity in?
First consideration should likely be taking an inventory of your team's skillset. Will your team struggle to keep up with introducing a new component framework to a project or thrive with the challenge of picking up a new repertoire of functions and libraries? If you have the bandwidth for mentorship and a learning curve you may choose to consider differently than if you’re needing a developer friendly front-end framework. Perhaps you're going to need to add to staff and build your team. If so, be aware of the talent pool and popularity of certain choices.
2) What is your customer or support team ready to maintain?
Everyone loves building flashy technology! But, can everyone keep the lights on after the hand-off? If your team has the exciting challenge of building the technology, but, ultimately will not be the team performing the long-term support and maintenance you should have a conversation around expectations with your customer or internal support team.
3) Do you need flexibility, scalability, extensibility, best code quality, full featured or fill in the blank?
Take a look at your tech landscape, customer business requirements, and architectural challenges. Your choice of front-end frameworks could end up really helping or hindering your overall project success. It is important to consider how easy a front-end framework is to extend and add on to in order to get the result you want. If early on you find information indicating that a framework is difficult to work with then it may not be the best choice. In some instances, a framework may not support things out of the box, or it supports a lot more than you need it to and that additional code just bloats the size of the libraries sent to the client. Other considerations in your tech landscape may include things like integrations into other libraries, etc. Your customer could have business requirements around things such as form validation.
4) Are availability of supporting documentation, examples, and best practices important?
Being an early adopter of a framework brings its own challenges because you may be some of the first developers using it and finding support information on how to correctly do some tasks may take time. If a framework has released recently and doesn’t have good documentation you may not want to move in that direction. If you like interacting with the developer community though, you may find that being an early adopter makes your team able to become subject matter experts.
Ultimately, there may be many right answers and your front-end choice may boil down to simply just your personal preference if you are working solo. And, as these frameworks continue to evolve, what makes sense today may look differently a year from now. While there is never a clear winner about which is "best" you should always consider your options before jumping onto a bandwagon.
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