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React vs Stack Overflow: What are the differences?

Key Differences between React and Stack Overflow

React and Stack Overflow are both widely used in the web development community, but they serve different purposes and have distinct characteristics. Here are the key differences between React and Stack Overflow:

  1. Language and Framework: React is a JavaScript library used for building user interfaces, while Stack Overflow is an online community and question-and-answer website for programmers. React is focused on front-end development, providing a set of tools to build interactive UI components, whereas Stack Overflow is a platform for developers to ask questions, provide answers, and share knowledge.

  2. Purpose and Application: React is primarily used for developing single-page applications (SPAs) and dynamic web interfaces. It allows developers to create reusable UI components and manage the state of an application efficiently. On the other hand, Stack Overflow serves as a platform for developers to find solutions to their coding problems and learn from the collective knowledge of the programming community.

  3. Development Workflow: React follows a component-based architecture, making it easier to manage and maintain complex user interfaces. Developers can break down the UI elements into smaller components and reuse them across the application. Stack Overflow, being a web-based platform, does not have a specific development workflow but provides a platform for developers to quickly find solutions to their coding issues.

  4. Learning and Documentation: React has extensive documentation and a large community of developers, which makes it easier for beginners to learn and get support. It also offers official tutorials and guides to help developers get started. Stack Overflow, on the other hand, relies on its community-driven approach and documentation. It allows developers to search for specific programming issues and provides a platform for knowledge sharing.

  5. Community Interaction: React has an active online community where developers can ask questions, participate in discussions, and contribute to open-source projects. Developers can join React-specific forums, attend meetups, and engage with other developers on social media platforms. Stack Overflow, on the other hand, has a dedicated community of programmers who actively participate in answering questions, sharing expertise, and voting on the best answers.

  6. Scalability and Performance: React is known for its performance optimizations, such as virtual DOM, which allows efficient rendering of UI updates. It provides tools like React Router and Redux for managing application state and routing. Stack Overflow, although a highly popular platform, might have occasional performance issues due to the large number of users and the need to handle a high volume of concurrent requests.

In summary, React is a JavaScript library for building UI components and managing application state, while Stack Overflow is a platform for developers to ask and answer coding-related questions. React is focused on front-end development, enables reusability, and has a strong community support, while Stack Overflow serves as a knowledge-sharing platform with a large community of programmers.

Advice on React and Stack Overflow
Needs advice
on
AngularJSAngularJSReactReact
and
Vue.jsVue.js

What is the best MVC stack to build mobile-friendly, light-weight, and fast single-page application with Spring Boot as back-end (Java)? Is Bootstrap still required to front-end layer these days?

The idea is to host on-premise initially with the potential to move to the cloud. Which combo would have minimal developer ramp-up time and low long-term maintenance costs (BAU support)?

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Replies (3)
Carolyne Stopa
Full Stack Developer at Contabilizei · | 10 upvotes · 615.5K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

React might be a good option if you're considering a mobile app for the future, because of react native. Although, Vue.js has the easiest learning curve and offers a better developer ramp-up time. Vue.js is great to build SPAs, very clean and organized and you won't have a lot of long-term maintenance problems (like AngularJS, for example). Bootstrap can still be used, but with flexbox there's no need anymore.

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Chaitanya Chunduri
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I recommend React because of less memory occupant compare to Angular, but this will depend on your organisation flexibility. When you use React you need to import different libraries as per your need. On the other side angular is a complete framework.

Performance-wise I vote for react js as it loads up quickly and lighter on the mobile. You can make good PWA with SSR as well.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

If you are new to all three react will be a good choice considering, react-native will be useful if you want to build cross platform mobile application today or tomorrow. If you are talking about bootstrap styling framework than it's a choice you can style ur components by ur self or use bootstrap 4.0 framework. The complete stack mentioned above is platform agnostic u can run it anywhere you want be it cloud or on-premise.

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Needs advice
on
Vue.jsVue.jsMoment.jsMoment.js
and
ReactReact

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
ReactReact

In my view, the upside of React is you're likely to find more existing, robust design systems (e.g. sets of components containing anything from buttons to datepickers) in the React ecosystem than Vue. UI frameworks aside, momentjs comes in when you want operate on the date(times) you get back from whatever datepicker you choose (e.g. date formatting, date match).

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Needs advice
on
ReactReact
and
Vue.jsVue.js

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

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Replies (16)
Johnny Bell
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I've used both Vue.js and React and I would stick with React. I know that Vue.js seems easier to write and its much faster to pick up however as you mentioned above React has way more ready made components you can just plugin, and the community for React is very big.

It might be a bit more of a steep learning curve for your friend to learn React over Vue.js but I think in the long run its the better option.

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Thomas LEVEIL
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

I chose to use Vue.js a few years ago mainly for the easy learning curve. I have no experience with React, so I won't make any comparison here. Regarding available components, I never felt locked in because of Vue when looking for components. It happens that a component I wish to use is not available as a Vue component (and nobody published any Vue wrapper for it), but in such cases I was able to quickly hack a Vue wrapper component. In the end I don't think a decision to choose one framework over another should be made solely because of the number of components available. (And not all components in either framework is maintained, bug free, documented or easy to use)

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

I would also go with React. The learning curve can be a little more difficult but as soon as you got the concepts it's really easy to create things. As everybody has mentioned the React community is huge and it keeps growing, anything you may need for your project there are super high probabilities that you will find it.

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Oguzhan Cetin
Senior Developer at Melantis · | 5 upvotes · 380.9K views
Recommends
on
ReactReact

React is great, Vue.js is also great. But I'm personally using React, because React is changing the way I look at how JavaScript should be. This is a really big plus for me. Vue is good, but it's just another alternative. Also, too many big companies are using React, that means you can trust it for big projects.

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Ben Shichman
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I'd have to concur that I'd advise React. In addition to the reasons mentioned, the developer pool is significantly larger (and also slightly more expensive) for React. In time, engineering costs will even out as more and more teams adopt it. The community support is fantastic, and the available components significant.

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Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

Would start with Vue especially if you want to progress more quickly and don't want/need to spend time learning React just for the sake of it. You can always pick up React later if necessary. I would caution about using "more readily available React components" just because they exist.

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Michael R.
Full-Stack Web Developer at STHCoders · | 3 upvotes · 379.8K views
Recommends
on
ReactReact

Anything that interacts with the Internet, websites, applications, etc., while it may be more complex to build, will be easier to maintain in the long run. React offers more flexibility, a much larger support base for knowledge and opinion, and is just as stable asVue.

To make the best comparison in my opinion, think of React as the Android OS and Vue more like iOS. While Vue may be advantageous in some cases, it is limited by constricting parameters. On the other hand, while React may be more complex and incorporate more open-source/third-party constructs, it is supported by over 50,000 npm packages and allows for the use of JSX. Which I might add, once learned, becomes second nature to employ and offers more flexibility.

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Mark Scott
Personal Development at Mark Scott · | 3 upvotes · 381.3K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

Having developed in both Vue.js and React, I agree with your assessment of Vue. It does feel light and easier to understand and therefore learn. Seeing that Vue has some genetic roots with React, I would say start your friend out on Vue. If they need to learn React later, that should give them a good foundation. If you have a Pluralsight subscription, look for my course on Vue.js and feel free to use the demo project as a starting point.

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Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js
at

Both have their pro's and con's; however to agree what has been mentioned here before; Using Vue.js will be easier as it's learning curve isn't steep; plus learning Vue.js will teach you fundamentals which (in a sense) can be applied to React as well. Community support for React is indeed very big, but Vue.js is also still growing. Component wise, I wouldn't worry to much about that, writing your own components is also a good tool for learning a language.

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Recommends
on
ReactReactVue.jsVue.js

I would recommend both of them since Vue is a UI library and helps you to design beautiful website while react allows you to handle backend problems like comment management and onspot reloading more efficiently also react includes useState and react is a framework while vue is a library

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

Virtual dom and JSX. Vue is just a baby to the race. React has it's mobile platform version as react native . so it would be easy for you and you wont reinvent the wheel again for mobile apps.

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Rajeev Borborah
Vice President Technology at WebMD · | 1 upvotes · 379.7K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

We did a comparison between React, Vue and Angular and while found each capable of supporting our needs, we ended up using VueJS because of its ease of use, the ability to use templates, large and growing community and good documentation. After developing on it for a around 4 months we re-evaluated and agreed that we had made the right choice and continue to migrate our products/platform to it.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

It all depends. Vue.js is smaller, and from what I saw (benchmarks) faster. It's also slightly more intuitive and easier to grasp. React is more popular, and the adoption rate is much higher.

Again, it all depends.

If I may, my personal choice would perhaps be either React or Svelte.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

It is hard to say which is good. I've used both. Vue is easier. But I feel more comfortable with React. That is why I chose React.

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S Milliken
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

As others have stated there are more canned components available for React, but your observation about it's complexity is an important one. There are architectural aspects of Vue.js that lead to cleaner more concise solutions. As React apps get bigger they become a little unwieldy. Depending on your requirements you need to weigh those competing concerns. Our team is using React, but I am beginning to question that choice as time goes on. Another consideration is that Vue.js is becoming more mature as we speak. Also as others join the project, react developers should be productive in Vue.js within days. Just my 2 cents...

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Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

VueJS hands down. Which components do you need? Have a look at Vuetify, mature project, plenty of components ready to plug and play. If on the other side you need more customization, have a look at tailwindcss. VueJS is much cleaner and IMO will overtake React soon. It's simply a better React.

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Decisions about React and Stack Overflow
Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 10 upvotes · 668.5K views

It was easier to find people who've worked on React than Vue. Angular did not have this problem, but seemed way too bloated compared to React. Angular also brings in restrictions working within their MVC framework. React on the other hand only handles the view/rendering part and rest of the control is left to the developers. React has a very active community, support and has lots of ready-to-use plugins/libraries available.

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José Oberto
Head of Engineering & Development at Chiper · | 14 upvotes · 580.2K views

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.

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Valeriy Bykanov
Founder, CEO at X1 Group · | 4 upvotes · 437.5K views

Working on a new SaaS web/mobile app and ended up with React as our choice of Frontend JavaScript framework for SPA web version with React Native for iOS, Android, Windows clients.

The key takeaways:

  • Both frameworks can do the job quite well for us. This might be true for the majority of utility web apps being built out there as well, so there was no "wrong" decision here.

  • Vue is often cited as easier to learn and code on. But only in case your engineers never worked with either Vue or React and start learning them from scratch. In our case, we knew we'll be hiring engineers who already have experience in the framework we'll select - so it was not a big argument for Vue.

  • We're building our engineering team in Ukraine and realised we have 3(!) times more engineers with React experience on the market than having Vue experience.

  • Mobile - React Native, despite being a different framework, still shares a lot with React and it's just easier for React developers to start using React Native in days.

The strongest points for our decision:

  • React community is larger, means more/faster answers to your questions and existing components.

  • Way more experienced React engineers on the market.

  • React + React Native is a great combo if you're building web and mobile clients of the same app.

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John Clifford de Vera
Software Engineer at CircleYY · | 21 upvotes · 444.9K views

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.

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Máté Homolya
Senior developer at Self-employed · | 11 upvotes · 303.7K views
Migrated
from
ReactReact
to
SvelteSvelte

Svelte is everything a developer could ever want for flexible, scalable frontend development. I feel like React has reached a maturity level where there needs to be new syntactic sugar added (I'm looking at you, hooks!). I love how Svelte sets out to rebuild a new language to write interfaces in from the ground up.

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 24 upvotes · 5M views

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

  • Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
  • Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
  • Jest as testing framework
  • Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
  • NativeScript-Vue 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.
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Malek Boubakri
Web developer at Quicktext · | 4 upvotes · 235.6K views

The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!

What do you think?

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Manatsawin Hanmongkolchai
Chose
jQueryjQuery
over
ReactReact
in

When I started TipMe, I thought about using React frontend. At the end, plain, simple jQuery won.

I had to build this iteration of the site fast and by using jQuery I could keep using Django as a full stack development tool. One important point is Django form (combined with Django Bootstrap3) means that I don't have to reinvent form rendering again, which will be the case with React.

Over time, more interactivity seeped into the site and React components start making its way into the codebase.

I now wish the site is built using React so that I could add more user friendly interfaces easier (no more fuddling with server states) but I would still say jQuery helped me get past those early days.

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Jonas Stendahl

React has by far and away been our most important library choice throughout the history of Sellpy. It is a library that offers great flexibility supported by a really strong core. The React team is doing incredible work bringing quality features to the core project and tons of quality third party libraries fill in the gaps.

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React was a very contentious decision among the Meteor community. We started off with Blazejs, which itself was based off of Handlebars. We liked the HTML-like syntax of Blaze and how nurses, doctors, and other clinicians could become familiar with it. However, the code wasn't very reusable and it was neither modular nor composeable nor testable, and became a major headache to maintain. React solves the problems of composeability and reusability and testing isolation, at the price of having worked the problem backwards and having wound up with a quirky syntax that runs within Javascript that looks similar to HTML but isn't. Nonetheless, React is quickly become a classic example of functional programming techniques, what with its' pure components. All in all, an enjoyable technology to work with that brings some sanity to front-end user interfaces.

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Pros of React
Pros of Stack Overflow
  • 837
    Components
  • 673
    Virtual dom
  • 578
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
  • 186
    Data flow
  • 166
    Declarative
  • 128
    Isn't an mvc framework
  • 120
    Reactive updates
  • 115
    Explicit app state
  • 50
    JSX
  • 29
    Learn once, write everywhere
  • 22
    Easy to Use
  • 21
    Uni-directional data flow
  • 17
    Works great with Flux Architecture
  • 11
    Great perfomance
  • 10
    Javascript
  • 9
    Built by Facebook
  • 8
    TypeScript support
  • 6
    Speed
  • 6
    Server Side Rendering
  • 6
    Scalable
  • 5
    Easy to start
  • 5
    Feels like the 90s
  • 5
    Awesome
  • 5
    Props
  • 5
    Cross-platform
  • 5
    Closer to standard JavaScript and HTML than others
  • 5
    Easy as Lego
  • 5
    Functional
  • 5
    Excellent Documentation
  • 5
    Hooks
  • 4
    Scales super well
  • 4
    Allows creating single page applications
  • 4
    Sdfsdfsdf
  • 4
    Start simple
  • 4
    Strong Community
  • 4
    Super easy
  • 4
    Server side views
  • 4
    Fancy third party tools
  • 3
    Rich ecosystem
  • 3
    Has arrow functions
  • 3
    Very gentle learning curve
  • 3
    Beautiful and Neat Component Management
  • 3
    Just the View of MVC
  • 3
    Simple, easy to reason about and makes you productive
  • 3
    Fast evolving
  • 3
    SSR
  • 3
    Great migration pathway for older systems
  • 3
    Simple
  • 3
    Has functional components
  • 3
    Every decision architecture wise makes sense
  • 2
    Sharable
  • 2
    Permissively-licensed
  • 2
    HTML-like
  • 2
    Image upload
  • 2
    Recharts
  • 2
    Fragments
  • 2
    Split your UI into components with one true state
  • 1
    React hooks
  • 1
    Datatables
  • 257
    Scary smart community
  • 206
    Knows all
  • 142
    Voting system
  • 134
    Good questions
  • 83
    Good SEO
  • 22
    Addictive
  • 14
    Tight focus
  • 10
    Share and gain knowledge
  • 7
    Useful
  • 3
    Fast loading
  • 2
    Gamification
  • 1
    Knows everyone
  • 1
    Experts share experience and answer questions
  • 1
    Stack overflow to developers As google to net surfers
  • 1
    Questions answered quickly
  • 1
    No annoying ads
  • 1
    No spam
  • 1
    Fast community response
  • 1
    Good moderators
  • 1
    Quick answers from users
  • 1
    Good answers
  • 1
    User reputation ranking
  • 1
    Efficient answers
  • 1
    Leading developer community

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Cons of React
Cons of Stack Overflow
  • 41
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 30
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 29
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
  • 6
    One-way binding only
  • 3
    State consistency with backend neglected
  • 3
    Bad Documentation
  • 2
    Error boundary is needed
  • 2
    Paradigms change too fast
  • 3
    Not welcoming to newbies
  • 3
    Unfair downvoting
  • 3
    Unfriendly moderators
  • 3
    No opinion based questions
  • 3
    Mean users
  • 2
    Limited to types of questions it can accept

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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What is 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.

What is Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

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What are some alternatives to React and Stack Overflow?
Angular
It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.
Vue.js
It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.
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.
NativeScript
NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.
jQuery
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
See all alternatives