Google Trends currently shows React as the most popular library for front-end developers, but software engineers’ opinions vary on which user interface is most beneficial for attracting talent and complimenting existing projects.
Case in point, the two following LA tech professionals, who are processing large amounts of marketing data and rewriting entire tech stacks.
Catherine Moy, software engineer at EZ Texting, prefers Angular because of the structure it provides. She finds it quick to learn and easy to teach. Moy said the mobile marketing platform is currently using Angular for a pattern library project, which her team is integrating into a pre-existing Angular workflow.
The Thrive Market team relies on React with Redux. Neeraj Mekala, director of web engineering, cited React’s modularity, simplicity and flexibility as contributing factors in his choice. Mekala’s colleagues are currently using Next.js to support large-scale company growth objectives, like a web stack rewrite effort.
Check back in further down the line and those toolboxes may change. As web apps continue to evolve, so will tech companies’ preferences regarding frameworks and libraries.
Moy prefers Angular over React and Vue because, among other reasons, it’s a fully fleshed-out framework. The EZ Texting developer said that choosing to use that library to build a new project was a no-brainer because no additional time was necessary for ramp-up.
Vue vs. React. vs. Angular: Which is your team’s preferred programming tool and why?
Our team’s preferred programming tool is Angular, which is written in TypeScript. It lets us easily describe our data models and set the data types we expect to receive from our APIs. This is important for us because we are processing and displaying large amounts of business data in our user interface.
Angular provides us with everything we need to make our application, out of the box. We do not need to search for other libraries to support our needs. It is easy to understand how the components will interact with each other and how routing will work because nothing will be unexpectedly introduced by an external library.
Tell us about the most recent project you worked on using this tool.
We decided to continue to use Angular for our pattern library project. We were integrating this project into a pre-existing Angular project, so it made sense to keep using the same framework. If we need to modify our pattern library project, it will be easier to adapt any changes to the existing Angular project.
I find typed languages easier to debug and understand than untyped languages.’’
Do you have any experience using one or more of these other technologies?
I do not have experience with React and Vue. My previous experience with front-end frameworks was with Apache Wicket, a framework written in Java. A lot of the front-end code was obscured and it was difficult to fix an issue if it was caused by the generated JavaScript.
Switching to Angular was seamless for me. Transitioning from writing Java to another typed language was straightforward. I find typed languages easier to debug and understand than untyped languages. That said, lifestyle issues can be hard to track down and debug.
At Thrive Market, Mekala said his team recently kicked off a rewrite effort of their entire web stack. For such an expansive job, the director of web engineering depends on Next.js and TypeScript. Mekala likes Next.js specifically because of its community backing and support features such as static served page rendering.
Vue vs. React. vs. Angular: Which is your team’s preferred programming tool and why?
We use React with Redux heavily at Thrive Market. We like React for its modularity, simplicity, flexibility and the large developer community support around it. Also, a lot of front-end web engineers are familiar with React so it helps us with access to some good developer talent.
We like React for its modularity, simplicity and flexibility.’’
Tell us about the most recent project you worked on using this tool.
We recently kicked off a rewrite effort of our entire web stack using Next.js and TypeScript. Next.js is a framework that uses React, webpack and Babel to abstract and provide several out-of-the-box support features. Some of those features include an optimized webpack build tooling, server-side rendering and routing.
Next.js also has wide community support, with more than 1,000 contributors and solid developer documentation. We are excited about this rewrite project, which we are building to support our continuing growth objectives.
