Thoughts on JS Frameworks.

Too many fancy words for one day! Frankly over last year, I have been hearing a lot about the JS frameworks and honestly they were intimidating. Today I grabbed up all my courage and plunged into this JS world. Being a Java developer at heart, I do not have a good impression on Javascript. I do not know how this feeling came into my head but it did.  But, this is in fact the very characteristic which a software engineer should not have. I understand that technology is supposed to progress and engineers should embrace it with all the love and here I am.

One thing that bothered me( and still does) is the plethora of options in JS. Even from the days when I started with jQuery, there were too many names in JS World. Names like AngularJS,MeteorJS, NodeJS, ReactJS, MEAN stack etc etc.. are confusing. So I started with everything.( ofcourse not everything, but I started with some of the big players). When I say “started”, I literally “started” and I did NOT dig deep at all. I barely scratched the surface, just enough to make me familiarize of what’s what.

So here are my findings:

1. AngularJS is for the front-end. It is much more approachable way than the standard libraries like jQuery.
2. NodeJS is for the back-end. Simply put, NodeJS is JSRE ( Javascript Runtime Environment) with which you can build server side applications. It is the Javascript without the browser which you can run as a server on your machines.
3. MEAN stack is basically MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS.
4. MeteorJS is a full fledged NodeJS framework with which you can build a complete app with front end and back end.

In my research, I read this amazing post https://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/meteor_js_vs_the_mean_stack which made me look into MeteorJS. So far am liking it as I am able to scoop up a sample app from meteor in matter of minutes. I think I will be working on it for few days to come and posting on it heavily. So please come back and check them out.

PS: If you are like me and trying to swim through JS frameworks, drop me a word about what you are interested in and why. It will be good to know on what I am missing.