ReactJS vs AngularJS 2 ultimate performance research 2017 In the world of deadlines, the right choice of technology takes crucial part. Having years of experience behind, we were involved in coding on dozens of languages, frameworks, and libraries. Bringing our knowledge together, we decided to shed some light on React vs Angular question and share some thoughts with you. Thus, in this article, we are going to transform our front-end development experience into something that will help you to determine the technology that fits you better. Why Angular 2? AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework providing everything needed to create a client-side of a website. During Angular 2 development, you can see that its second version got rid of unnecessary complexity that was present in previous one. For example, Angular 2 team has removed or replaced nearly all the concepts from the first version. I am talking about modules, controllers, scopes, directives etc. However, they have not stopped only on making their framework simpler. They also added new notable features and some improvements. Among features, we would like to single out native app support and server-side rendering. Talking about improvements, we cannot omit the fact that AngularJS 2 performance increased dramatically. How did it get popular? The fact that Angular is Google's creation inspires trust by itself Designed in such a way allowing coders not to injure their psyche while learning Angular after other languages Many coders point out that if your Angular code looks complicated - you are doing something wrong Websites built on AngularJS: YouTube (for PS3), GoodFilms, Freelancer, Upwork Why ReactJS? Unlike Angular, ReactJS is a JavaScript-based open-source library with a JSX compiler. It is mainly focused on the user interface allowing to create reusable UI views components. Using React you should always remember that it is not one more MVC framework but just a library for rendering your views. This way, React is an interface-focused solution since your users get a highly responsive interface with smooth loading. How did it get popular? Facebook stands behind this project ReactJS solutions are SEO-friendly ReactJS performance and flexibility are high Famous ReactJS websites: Netflix, Feedly, Airbnb, Walmart How to make your choice? Now, let's dive deeper into details that may be quite important during technology selection. License You should be acknowledged with a kind of a license the framework is disturbed under. Most licenses are pretty flexible to work with and you can use them to create commercial apps without any problems. However, there is a variety of licenses that do not give you such a freedom of actions. It is better to do simple research than to learn about having no rights on the commercial distribution of your product, right? Note: One of the AngularJS and ReactJS advantages is that they are both open-source with no restrictions towards the usage. Worth to mention that Angular uses MIT license against 3-clause BSD used in React. However, the only visible difference of
BSD is a ban on usage of right holders' name for advertising purposes. MVC pattern The Model-View-Controller pattern allows to split the project's data into three components: model, view, and controller. This way, the modification of each component can be conducted independently leading to tighter code and increasing the quality of the final product. Except for MVC patterns, there are also Model-View-Presenter (MVP) and Model-ViewView-Model (MVVM). Note: Among all the Angular 2 features, the availability of MVC pattern out-of-thebox is a significant advantage over React. Since from three letters of that acronym it has only 'V' - view. In case you need 'M' and 'C', you should look elsewhere to solve this problem. Templating Talking about Angular 2 benefits, worth to mention its ease of display templates writing. Having really straightforward UI for your data, Angular allows you to get the end result with the more intuitive approach to the user interface that demands less code and seems to be more 'obvious'. In case with React, it requires special functions in order to manage data display. Mostly, it means that you should define the way your data is represented before it will be coded into the DOM. That may cause a disconnect during its attempts to determine how a certain element will be rendered. Note: Up to 80% of what you are doing while online service creation is writing its UI. So, you better weight these technologies' templating approaches in order to figure out that one, corresponding to your coding preferences. Data Binding Angular uses two-way data binding. With its help, the framework is able to connect DOM to Model data via the Controller. In a nutshell, when users interact with inputs and give a new value to your app - not only View can be updated but the Model too. Accordingly, you do not need to write any method for tracking this changes within the app. Note: Angular's approach affects performance since a watcher for each binding is created. React uses one-way data binding, where the flow of data is directed only in one way. Due to this, you will always be aware of a place where your data changes. Note: React's approach is much easier to debug when it comes to large applications. Worth to say a word about client-side vs server-side rendering. Actually, a serverside rendering was used in the first versions of Angular, creating difficulties for marketing. Since a browser perceives a client-side rendering as a JavaScript with pure opportunities for SEO optimization. That is a significant disadvantage because most of the digital products demand a lot of marketing power to stay alive. Also, client-side rendering may affect pages loading a lot. However, starting from the second version, Angular developers have fixed that issue transferring its rendering model to the server side. Performance As you know, Angular creates a watcher for every binding in order to track all the changes in DOM. As soon as the View gets some updates, Angular start comparing obtained values with the initial ones. The matter is that technology checks not only those values that have changed but all of them having watchers. Note: Angular 2 performance may cause some problems when it comes to massive apps. ReactJS developers have introduced the virtual DOM concept that allows creating light DOM tree saving it on the server. Every time a user interact with the website, for example filling the form, React creates a new virtual DOM for comparing it with the previous one. After the library has found all the differences between these two models - the virtual DOM will be rebuilt. All the process is conducted within the server this way reducing the load on the browser. Note: ReactJS performance increases when it comes to big amounts of data since there are no watchers. We have prepared the graph showing the evaluation of these technologies by criteria. These marks are based on our personal experience.
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