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  5. AngularJS vs Vanilla.JS

AngularJS vs Vanilla.JS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AngularJS
AngularJS
Stacks61.5K
Followers44.5K
Votes5.3K
GitHub Stars59.0K
Forks27.3K
Vanilla.JS
Vanilla.JS
Stacks82
Followers85
Votes9

AngularJS vs Vanilla.JS: What are the differences?

Introduction

AngularJS is a popular JavaScript framework used for building dynamic web applications, while Vanilla.JS refers to the traditional use of plain JavaScript without any additional frameworks or libraries. Here are the key differences between AngularJS and Vanilla.JS:

  1. Data Binding: AngularJS provides two-way data binding, where changes in the UI automatically update the model and vice versa. On the other hand, Vanilla.JS requires manual updating of the model and UI separately, making it less efficient for complex applications.

  2. Modularity: AngularJS promotes a modular approach through its dependency injection feature, allowing developers to separate concerns into reusable components. Vanilla.JS, being a plain JavaScript, does not provide built-in modularity features, requiring developers to manually organize and manage code dependencies.

  3. DOM Manipulation: AngularJS abstracts away low-level DOM manipulation, allowing developers to work with a higher-level model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. Vanilla.JS, however, requires explicit DOM manipulation, making it more suitable for smaller projects where direct control over the DOM is necessary.

  4. Testing: With AngularJS, testing is made easier by providing built-in support for unit testing and dependency injection. Vanilla.JS does not come with any testing infrastructure out of the box, requiring developers to set up their own testing frameworks and dependencies.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: AngularJS has a large and active community, providing a wealth of resources, libraries, and third-party integrations. Vanilla.JS, being a core JavaScript language, also has a wide range of resources available, but it may not have as many specialized libraries and tools specifically catered to web application development.

  6. Learning Curve: AngularJS has a steeper learning curve compared to Vanilla.JS, as it introduces additional concepts and patterns. Vanilla.JS, being the core JavaScript language, is generally easier to learn and understand, especially for beginners or developers who prefer a straightforward approach.

Summary

In summary, AngularJS offers two-way data binding, modularity through dependency injection, abstraction of low-level DOM manipulation, built-in testing support, a strong community, and a steeper learning curve, while Vanilla.JS requires manual updates, lacks modularity features, requires explicit DOM manipulation, lacks built-in testing support, has a wide but potentially less specialized ecosystem, and has a lower learning curve.

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Advice on AngularJS, Vanilla.JS

Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 22, 2020

DecidedonVuetifyVuetifyVue.jsVue.jsNuxt.jsNuxt.js

Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:

  • @{Nuxt.js}|tool:7304| consisting of @{Vue CLI}|tool:9559|, @{Vue Router}|tool:6932|, @{vuex}|tool:6705|, @{Webpack}|tool:1682| and @{Sass}|tool:1171| (Bundler for @{HTML5}|tool:2538|, @{CSS 3}|tool:6727|), @{Babel}|tool:2739| (Transpiler for @{JavaScript}|tool:1209|),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed @{Vue.js}|tool:3837| components
  • @{Vuetify}|tool:6163| as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • @{TypeScript}|tool:1612| as programming language
  • @{Apollo}|tool:5508| / @{GraphQL}|tool:3820| (incl. @{GraphiQL}|tool:7879|) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • @{ESLint}|tool:3337|, @{TSLint}|tool:5561| and @{Prettier}|tool:7035| for coding style and code analyzes
  • @{Jest}|tool:830| as testing framework
  • @{Google Fonts}|tool:2652| and @{Font Awesome}|tool:3244| for typography and icon toolkit
  • @{NativeScript-Vue}|tool:9623| for mobile development

The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:

  • Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
  • Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
  • Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
  • Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
  • Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
  • Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
5.13M views5.13M
Comments
John Clifford
John Clifford

Software Engineer at CircleYY

Jun 8, 2020

Decided

I used React not just because it is more popular than Angular. But the declarative and composition it gives out of the box is fascinating and React.js is just a very small UI library and you can build anything on top of it.

Composing components is the strongest asset of React for me as it can breakdown your application into smaller pieces which makes it easy to reuse and scale.

455k views455k
Comments
José
José

Head of Engineering & Development at Chiper

Jun 23, 2020

Decided

It is a very versatile library that provides great development speed. Although, with a bad organization, maintaining projects can be a disaster. With a good architecture, this does not happen.

Angular is obviously powerful and robust. I do not rule it out for any future application, in fact with the arrival of micro frontends and cross-functional teams I think it could be useful. However, if I have to build a stack from scratch again, I'm left with react.

592k views592k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

AngularJS
AngularJS
Vanilla.JS
Vanilla.JS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

It is a fast and cross-platform framework for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications. it is the most lightweight framework available anywhere.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
59.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
27.3K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
61.5K
Stacks
82
Followers
44.5K
Followers
85
Votes
5.3K
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 889
    Quick to develop
  • 589
    Great mvc
  • 573
    Powerful
  • 520
    Restful
  • 505
    Backed by google
Cons
  • 12
    Complex
  • 4
    Dependency injection
  • 3
    Event Listener Overload
  • 2
    Learning Curve
  • 2
    Hard to learn
Pros
  • 2
    Web-components
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 1
    Easy to learn
  • 1
    Faster than any framework
  • 1
    NO CONVENTIONS
Cons
  • 2
    You need to build anything yourself
Integrations
JavaScript
JavaScript
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to AngularJS, Vanilla.JS?

jQuery

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

React

React

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Ember.js

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Svelte

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Angular

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Flux

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

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