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JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. To make working with JavaScript easy, we use frameworks to make our apps manageable and maintainable.

In this article, we'll look at the JavaScript frameworks that are popular now or are up and coming.

React

The most popular front end framework in the world. It's one of the first to let us build apps in a component-based architecture that many know and love today.

It has lots of libraries and documentation associated with it. Also, there're lots of communities to ask for help, including lots of questions that are answered on Stack Overflow and forums like Reactiflux, which has a large audience.

We can use TypeScript or Flow to add type checking to prevent many mistakes that we could have made without it.

It only has the view portion of the app, so we have to add our own libraries to make a single-page app.

Angular

Angular is a front end framework made by Google. Like React, it uses the component-based architecture for app construction. It's a framework with many things that you need are included, including form validation, HTTP client, animation, testing and more.

It's not as popular as React, but it's still useful to know since there's a loyal developer following.

The whole framework is written in TypeScript, and developers use TypeScript to develop Angular apps.

Vue

Vue combines the best of React and Angular into one package. It's more expressive than Angular and it has concepts like props from React. It has associated libraries for routing, which is the Vue Router. To store a shared state, we can use Vuex.

It also has lots of libraries for styling and dynamic elements like carousels, styled inputs, tables, and more.

Vue is up and coming, and it's getting more popular every year as more teams adopt it for their front end apps.

Express

Express is a Node.js back end framework for developing APIs and full-fledged web apps.

It has many middleware libraries to do many things that we want including receiving uploads, creating a GraphQL API, and much more.

Also, it's very simple on its own so it's easy to use it to get into back end development.

Nest.js

A full-fledged back end framework that uses Express as its base. It's written in TypeScript and includes an ORM called TypeORM for database manipulation.

It has many features to make developing a full-featured back end app easy like route guards to check if a route can be reached by a user, and interceptors for intercepting HTTP requests and responses and doing things to them.

Nest.js also supports GraphQL, WebSockets, and microservices, so it's useful for lots of applications.

In addition, it has a CLI to make scaffolding and building easy.

Conclusion

JavaScript isn't a toy language anymore. It's a language that can be used to develop full-fledged web apps like any other language. It has the frameworks to make developing the apps easy and has a large community of users using these popular frameworks.