With increasing complexity in front-end development and rising demand for higher quality in less time. Many front-end JavaScript frameworks are introduced in recent times like Angular JS and React JS. The number of JavaScript packages registered on npm (World’s largest Software Library Registry) is exploding in comparison to other programming languages in recent years.

Now that it is understood; there is a lot going on in terms of front-end technology, let me introduce to Vue.js and why is it better than other frameworks.

Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework developed by Evan You. After working for Google on many projects with Angular Js, he wanted to create something very lightweight with all the benefits of Angular JS. After working for almost a year, Vue was first released in Feb 2014. Today it is open free source software under MIT license which is backed by corporate sponsorships and community spread around the world.

Vue.js started to gain its popularity back in 2016 where many developers started using Laravel+ Vue.js as a full-stack ecosystem. Vue.js has now been injected into the Laravel framework, and it’s quite popular.

This tool is perfect for creating user interfaces for a single page application or an enterprise-grade complex and stable application. Thanks to its smooth and seamless integration with other development tools and libraries, Vue.Js is not just a core library to create a user interface for the web but it is an ecosystem of highly compatible tools including, Vue Router, Vuex, Vue CLI, Vue dev tools and Vue test util.

The main purpose of developing Vue was to make developers life easy with a framework which is easy to learn and at the same time very flexible.

Some advantages of using Vue are listed as below:

1) Lightweight:

The success of JavaScript the framework depends on how small it is the size. With all benefits provided Vue just adds around 50 Kbs to the webpage, which makes it render dynamic pages with almost no latency

2) Small API

As Vue was created with the focus of making web development easy, Thus it does not has many methods and configure properties unlike other frameworks

3) Easy to understand & develop:

Like Angular and React, For Vue also atomic unit of its architecture are components. It has a well-defined architecture for keeping your data, life-cycle methods and user-defined methods separate. This provides users with better control and even if there is an error one can easily trace the blocks for errors

4) Compatible Ecosystem:

As mentioned before, Vue is not just a library to create user interface but it is an ecosystem of highly compatible tools that makes it popular among the web developers. Vue framework can be easily integrated into other applications built on JavaScript. You can go ahead and add Vue.js CDN and start using it for making single page application with Vue Router, use Vuex for state management or use Vue Test Utilities to test application with facebook frameworks like Jest

5) Highly Flexible

Given the wide spectrum of projects agencies get not all projects are single-page applications and not all projects are to be built from the starch, it is very important to adapt framework which flexible with HTML file, CSS files, E5S JavaScript file, and pure JavaScript file. Vue allows the user to work with different file formats using virtual nodes. This also makes it easier for developers using other frameworks to understand and use. Most importantly we can use Vue without requiring the built process that most frontend frameworks need.

6) Easy to understand documentation:

Vue is supported by a community of developers who regularly contribute to documentation; it is one of the most starred projects on Github. It is because of their hard work docs are comprehensive and sufficient enough for an intermediate programmer to learn basics of Vue by its own, just by reading docs

7) Two-Way Communication:

Vue.js facilitates two-way communications because of its architecture which makes it quite easy to handle HTML blocks. It seems very close to Angular.js which also speeds up HTML blocks. This feature is also termed as 2-Way Data Binding; It means we can bind data with the view where Vue is aware of data that is being fed on your page /view. Vue.js is also called Reactive because it reacts to whenever your data is changed.

Pre-requisites to learn Vue.js:

  • Good Understanding of HTML & CSS
  • Ability to manipulate data through JavaScript
  • ES6 Knowledge is a Plus

Understanding Vue.Js in detail:

Installing Vue:

You can Install Vue 2 through 1) CDN 2) NPM and 3) Vue CLI
However the most easiest and common way of installing it is through Vue CLI
You will need npm if you want to install vue using vue CLI , You can follow below steps to install:
#This command will install vue-cli globally
npm install –g vue –cli or npm install –global vue-cli
# initialize new project with web pack template (it will ask bunch of questions, just go with default)
npm init web pack new-project-vue
#Go to folder and install all dependencies with npm
cd new-project-vue
npm intall
# If you want to run app and view output use below command (you can browse webpage using localhost: 8080)
99% of the time above command will work and in case you have anything running on 8080 , you can go to webpack.dev.conf.js and change constant PORT to anything you want and it will start working on that port

Files installed by CLI:

Once Vue is installed, CLI will install the src folder, which has assets and components folder, Assets folder will have app.vue file and components will have component.vue for editing and importing other components to the project

Vue Templating:

It allows binding values from the model into the view. In Vue, this can be achieved using simple HTML bindings. We can have logical rendering for switch-based output. Depending on our need we can program our page to behave using Vue templating. However now this can also be achieved by raw JS using JSX from Vue 2 onwards

Components and Nesting:

Components are reusable Vue instances with a name. Components can be considered the heart of organizing code in manageable chunks, similar to Angular, Vue also provides components creation. However, it uses it better than Angular

Event Handling:

When we talk about the reactive app, it will mean that page/view is capable to handle the event that happens on the page, be it click, load or anything else, we can have our code work whenever our desired event happens on the page

CSS Transition & Animations:

Well in today’s world nobody likes good design (which doesn’t have beautiful animations), Vue does provide a lot of features that will power you to add animations to your view/page. It has a strong library that provides a lot of built-in animation functions that can be used without much learning. It really simplifies on how you can add cool animations on your website

Conclusion & Comparison:

Frontend developers like other developers have a different set of preferences depending on what works out for them. That is why there can be a never-ending debate on which JS framework is best.

As of today, there are two popular frameworks (along with Node.js) that are highly valued by most developers – React.js and Vue.js. But which one is better? It depends on what tasks you are going to resolve.

Vue.js is inspired by two already great web frameworks i.e. React and Angular. It takes the best of both. Like React it is component-based and uses Virtual DOM which makes it incredibly fast, on the other hand, Angular, it has Directives and 2-Way Data Binding. Although every framework has its strong and weak side. Just for the sake of knowing them better a brief comparison is given in the table below: