We hope you enjoyed this round-up of the JavaScript universe in 2017.
We have seen by the numbers that Vue.js is once again the winner of this year, and its success is not slowing down.
The React eco-system keeps growing up, after finally putting its license-related issues behind it.
But if we had to pick one project among the 2017 Rising Stars it would be Prettier. It's so nice to be able to write code without worrying about formatting!
And for another point view on the latest trends, be sure to also check out the State of JavaScript 2017 survey, where we collected and analyzed responses from more than 23,000 developers.
So going forward, which projects do you think will be the next JavaScript Rising Stars in 2018?
- A new framework based on GraphQL?
- A library that takes advantage of the new WebAssembly standard to create a unique experience in the browser?
Let us know what you think! In the meantime, thank you for your attention, and feel free to share this article or reach us on GitHub if you have any feedback… and see you next year!
Overview
These are the hottest projects of the year, all categories included.
Vue.js strikes again
Once again, Vue.js is the trendiest project of the year, with more than 40,000 stars added on GitHub during the year.
It's far more than in 2016 (26,000 stars), and the gap with the next contender (React) is even bigger.
So what makes Vue.js special?
.vue
file is really nice.And this may be related with the last point, but Vue.js is very popular among developers from China. It's used by the biggest e-commerce platform of China (Alibaba), but also by companies like GitLab or Adobe.
React, number 2, again!
Like in 2016, React is number 2, with more than 27,000 stars added on GitHub (note that we're specifically talking about stars added over the year, not the total number of stars).
Create React App, the third project, is the recommended way to start a new project with React, and its success made a lot of React boilerplates less relevant than before.
Dan Abramov (the creator of Redux, now working for Facebook) did a great job, finding the right balance between simplicity and features. For example there is no fancy styling solution (just plain CSS), no server-side rendering, but everything is well packaged and the developer experience is really good.
Axios
The Axios library is the most used HTTP client.
It can work on both the client side (AJAX requests from the client) or on the server-side (HTTP requests in a Node.js environment)
Its success may be related to Vue.js too, because a lot of Vue.js tutorials use it to query a distant API through HTTP.
Puppeteer
Puppeteer is one of the great stories of the year. Made by the Google Chrome team, it's a headless Chrome browser, that is to say a browser that runs in the background and that can be piloted by code.
It can be used to do things like: