As we did last year, it's time to look back at the JavaScript landscape in 2017.

Let's see by the numbers which projects got traction in 2017 by comparing the numbers of stars added on GitHub over the last 12 months, and find out who are 2017's JavaScript Rising Stars.


The following graphs compare the number of stars added on GitHub over the last 12 months. We analyzed projects coming from Best of JS, a curated list of the best projects related to the web platform. Note that you can click on a project to get more info.

Table of Contents

  1. Most Popular Projects Overall
    Vue.jsReactCreate React AppPuppeteerAxiosVS CodePrettierReact NativeElementElectron
  2. Front-end Frameworks
    Vue.jsReactAngularPreactHyperapp
  3. Node.js Frameworks
    ExpressKoaFastifyGunmicro
  4. React Ecosystem
    Create React AppAnt DesignNext.jsStorybookGatsby
  5. Vue Ecosystem
    ElementiViewVuexWeexNuxt
  6. Mobile
    React NativeWeexIonicQuasarNativeScript
  7. Compilers
    TypeScriptBabelFlowReasonPurescript
  8. Build Tools
    ParcelWebpackGulpRollupPoi
  9. Testing Frameworks
    JestAVAMochaJasmineTape
  10. IDEs & Editors
    VS CodeAtomReactideBracketsNuclide
  11. CSS in JavaScript
    Styled ComponentsCSS ModulesPolishedGlamorousEmotion
  12. Static Sites
    GatsbyHexoReact StaticPhenomicMetalsmith
  13. GraphQL
    GatsbyReact Starter KitApollo clientGraphQLGraphiQL
  14. Conclusion

Most Popular Projects Overall

1
Vue.js

Vue.js

🖖 A progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.
+40.0k☆

Trends in 2017

3.0k
3.5k
3.9k
3.1k
3.2k
3.1k
3.6k
3.3k
3.6k
3.4k
3.1k
3.0k
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

GitHub data

Created
2013-07
Total stars
80.7k☆

Links

GitHub
vuejs/vue
Homepage
vuejs.org
Best of JS
bestofjs.org/projects/vuejs
2
React

React

A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
+27.8k☆
3
Create React App

Create React App

Create React apps with no build configuration.
+22.5k☆
4
Puppeteer

Puppeteer

Headless Chrome Node API
+22.0k☆
5
Axios

Axios

Promise based HTTP client for the browser and node.js
+21.9k☆
6
VS Code

VS Code

Visual Studio Code
+20.2k☆
7
Prettier

Prettier

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter.
+17.7k☆
8
React Native

React Native

A framework for building native apps with React.
+15.6k☆
9
Element

Element

A Vue.js 2.0 UI Toolkit for Web
+14.9k☆
10
Electron

Electron

Build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
+14.8k☆

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?

  • First, it has a small learning curve, with a component approach similar to React but with a more familiar syntax.
  • The ecosystem is well defined, including a set of de-facto standards: router: vue-router, State management library: Vuex
  • The concept of single-file component that includes template, logic and styles in a single file .vue file is really nice.
  • It's used by one of the most popular PHP frameworks, Laravel, as its default view engine.
  • It's not backed by a big company of the Internet like Facebook or Google but maintained by Evan You as an open-source project sponsored through crowd-sourcing.

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:

  • Automatically testing web application UIs in real browsers.
  • Taking snapshots of web pages to do server-side rendering.
  • Generating PDF files using Google Chrome ability to save pages as PDF files.

Front-end Frameworks

1
Vue.js

Vue.js

🖖 A progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.
+40.0k☆
2
React

React

A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
+27.8k☆
3
Angular

Angular

One framework. Mobile & desktop.
+12.2k☆
4
Preact

Preact

⚛️ Fast 3kB React alternative with the same modern API. Components & Virtual DOM.
+10.4k☆
5
Hyperapp

Hyperapp

1 KB JavaScript library for building web applications.
+8.1k☆

The "front-end framework" category has been a battlefield for a while, but it seems that things are finally calming down, as we can see clearly 3 big players dominating the game.

The Big-3: Vue, React and Angular

Without surprise, the 3 most popular UI frameworks are Vue.js, React and Angular

It's common to call these frameworks but, to be more accurate, the only framework is Angular, and we should call Vue.js and React libraries.

We talked previously about the success of Vue.js and its integrated approach.

By opposition, the React landscape is still fragmented, and developers have to make more deliberate choices about all the things that go around the view layer:

  • Routing between pages.
  • How to fetch data.
  • How to bind forms to data.
  • How store the state of the application.

On the contrary, the Angular ecosystem is more controlled, more stable. There is an Angular Way to do things.

That's probably partly why Angular has a more "corporate" image. And this image has been emphasized with the usage of static types using TypeScript, which resonates with backend developers familiar with types from languages like C# or Java.

Less is more

Behind the Big-3, it's very interesting to notice that Preact is number 4. Preact is a smaller alternative to React: the same API, but in less than 3KB.

Similar, most other contenders in this category emphasize a small footprint that leads to better performance in the browser in order to differentiate themselves from the big 3.

The best example about this motto is Hyperapp, a very hot project over the last weeks. It mixes the functional approach and the JSX syntax from React and a state management system inspired by Redux... In less than 1 KB!

Node.js Frameworks

1
Express

Express

Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for node.
+6.7k☆
2
Koa

Koa

Expressive middleware for node.js using ES2017 async functions
+5.8k☆
3
Fastify

Fastify

Fast and low overhead web framework, for Node.js
+5.8k☆
4
Gun

Gun

A realtime, decentralized, offline-first, graph database engine.
+3.2k☆
5
micro

micro

Asynchronous HTTP microservices
+3.2k☆

Of course JavaScript is no more limited to the front-end side of web applications, it's more and more used to create the back-end too, and Mikeal Rogers, an influent member of the node.js community, predicts that Node.js Will Overtake Java Within a Year.

But unlike other languages where de-facto standards have emerged over the years (think about Ruby on Rails for Ruby, Django for Python or Laravel for PHP), there is no golden standard or recommended architecture when you want to create a new node.js server.

Despite its age, Express was not only the trendiest node.js framework in 2017 but it's also used as the backbone of many other frameworks or CMS, including Feathers, Keystone or Nest.

It seems that Express minimalist approach perfectly matches the micro-services trend that promotes the creation of several decoupled smaller applications over the development of a single "monolith" application.

Compared to last year, 3 newcomers joined the TOP 10 node.js frameworks:

  • Fastify is built as a general-purpose web framework, inspired by hapi, but is well suited to building fast JSON-based HTTP APIs.
  • Server.js aims to be a ‘everything works out of the box’ experience.
  • Nest features an architecture familiar to Angular developers, made of modules and controller, written in TypeScript.

React Ecosystem

1
Create React App

Create React App

Create React apps with no build configuration.
+22.5k☆
2
Ant Design

Ant Design

🐜 A UI Design Language
+13.3k☆
3
Next.js

Next.js

Framework for server-rendered or statically-exported React apps
+12.7k☆
4
Storybook

Storybook

Interactive UI component dev & test: React, React Native, Vue, Angular
+9.7k☆
5
Gatsby

Gatsby

⚛️📄🚀 Blazing fast static site generator for React
+9.7k☆

The React library being only the view layer, it creates space for a whole ecosystem that is moving very fast. In this category, we included projects built on top of React and React Native libraries.

In 2016 Create React App solved the problem of how to start coding a React application by providing a nice set of presets, very well packaged. Facebook keeps releasing new versions very often and it was by far the most popular project in 2017 among the React ecosystem.

As an example of its success, we could mention StackBlitz, an online IDE that lets you run application created from Create React App, right from the browser, in a few seconds.

But even if Create React App is often considered as the default "starter kit" for React, developers may need more opinionated starter kits: React boilerplate was the most popular project in this category, providing a lot of feature like the GraphQL integration.

Ant Design, Ant Design Pro and Material UI are sets of styled React components to help developers create a web application with React components, without worrying about the styling.

Recompose's popularity denotes one of the features seasoned developers love about React: its "functional" approach, everything is just a function and Recompose provides a full set of helpers to go further in this direction.

Vue Ecosystem

1
Element

Element

A Vue.js 2.0 UI Toolkit for Web
+14.9k☆
2
iView

iView

A high quality UI Toolkit built on Vue.js 2.0
+9.5k☆
3
Vuex

Vuex

🗃️ Centralized State Management for Vue.js.
+7.2k☆
4
Weex

Weex

A framework for building Mobile cross-platform UI.
+6.5k☆
5
Nuxt

Nuxt

Versatile Vue.js Framework
+6.3k☆
6
Vuetify

Vuetify

Material Component Framework for Vue.js 2
+6.3k☆
7
Mint UI

Mint UI

Mobile UI elements for Vue.js
+5.5k☆
8
vux

vux

Mobile UI Components based on Vue & WeUI
+4.6k☆
9
vue-router

vue-router

🚦 The official router for Vue.js.
+4.6k☆
10
Vue material

Vue material

Material design for Vue.js
+3.7k☆

Guest Writer: Evan You

As much as we admire Vue.js, we have to admit we're not that familiar with its ecosystem.

That's why we looked for an expert to give us their opinion on this year's stats, and who better than the creator of Vue.js himself?

Guest Writer evan

With the rising popularity of Vue itself, many Vue ecosystem projects also enjoyed rapid growth in 2017.

Element and iView are the two most popular UI component kits, both focused on rapid desktop UI development. Mint UI and vux, on the other hand, are the two most popular mobile-focused UI kits.

Vuetify is a Material Design component framework that can be used for both mobile and desktop web apps, and is probably the most feature rich with server-side rendering, PWA and CLI template support. There's also Vue material which focuses more on providing a set components that strictly adhere to the Material Design spec.

Nuxt is a higher-level framework built on top of Vue that provides a very smooth development experience for building universal, server-rendering Vue applications. It is also very versatile - you can use the same codebase to ship a normal SPA, or even generate a static site.

Weex is a framework that allows users to develop native-rendering mobile apps using familiar Vue syntax and API. It is developed by Alibaba and used in production in some of the most heavily used mobile apps in the world, with a strong focus on performance.

Mobile

1
React Native

React Native

A framework for building native apps with React.
+15.6k☆
2
Weex

Weex

A framework for building Mobile cross-platform UI.
+6.5k☆
3
Ionic

Ionic

Build amazing native and progressive web apps with open web technologies. One app running on everyth
+5.5k☆
4
Quasar

Quasar

Quasar Framework
+3.7k☆
5
NativeScript

NativeScript

NativeScript is an open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with JavaScript. Use
+2.9k☆

JavaScript is so versatile that it can also be used to build mobile applications, meaning that you can share components between the web and the mobile platforms.

In this category, we find again the 3 main actors of the "Front-end frameworks":

Like in 2016, React Native is the trendiest solution, based on JavaScript, to build a native application, whether it's for iOS, Android or Windows systems.

As highlighted in this video Cross platform apps with React Native, the promise: "Write Once, Run Everywhere" was fulfilled!

Compilers

1
TypeScript

TypeScript

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output.
+11.6k☆
2
Babel

Babel

:tropical_fish: Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.
+5.7k☆
3
Flow

Flow

Adds static typing to JavaScript to improve developer productivity and code quality.
+5.1k☆
4
Reason

Reason

Simple, fast & type safe code that leverages the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems
+2.1k☆
5
Purescript

Purescript

A strongly-typed language that compiles to Javascript
+1.2k☆

Here we talk about languages that compile to regular JavaScript code.

You may need such a compiler in your building workflow for 2 reasons:

  • You want to enjoy all the features of the latest version of the JavaScript language (ES7) while making your code compatible with a maximum of Web browsers. This feature made the success of Babel, which a lot of projects depend on.
  • You want to add new features to the language... such as "type checking".

One of the hottest questions that divide developers is: types or not types?

JavaScript has basic dynamic types but not static types. A lot of developers feel like they need types in their code, especially in big code base, to make it more robust and easier to read/understand.

And then, if you think you need types, the 2 main contenders are: TypeScript, provided by Microsoft and Flow, provided by Facebook (and used on their main projects: React, React Native, Jest...)

Read this article from James Kyle to understand the difference: A Comparison Between Adopting Flow or TypeScript

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Conclusion

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!


Authors

Sacha Greif

Author of Discover Meteor and creator of Vulcan, a React+GraphQL open-source framework.

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