After 2016 and 2017, welcome to the third edition of the JavaScript Rising Stars!
It's time to look back at the JavaScript landscape in 2018.
Let's see by the numbers which projects got traction in 2018 by comparing the numbers of stars added on GitHub over the last 12 months, and find out who are 2018's JavaScript Rising Stars.
In the battlefield of the front-end framework category, the 3 dominant actors were the same than in 2017: Vue.js, React and Angular.
If you check the graph, you may notice a peak of stars in June for both Vue.js and React. The reason? It was the time Vue.js passed React in terms of total number of stars, becoming the most popular project in the UI frameworks category. At that time, fans from both sides did their best to push their champion!
The newcomer in 2018 is Omi, a very promising UI framework that takes advantage of the Shadow DOM technology, while using the "JSX" syntax, familiar to React developers.
The 2 leading Node.js frameworks in 2018 are "full-stack frameworks" related to a specific front-end framework:
They both provide a great developer experience to set up Single-Page Applications, while providing Server-Side Rendering features.
At position number 4 Express, the number one in 2017, stays very popular, despite its age.
No surprise in the React eco-system category, the project number one in 2018 is Create React App, the de-facto tool to start a new React application.
The version 2 was released in 2018, it was a major upgrade that includes the version 4 of Webpack and the possibility to use TypeScript.
About the React library itself, the introduction of hooks is a major addition, that may change a lot of things about the way we deal with state management and side effects with React.
Vue.js momentum is still growing, the version 3 should take advantage of modern browsers abilities to make it even faster and easier to use.
Vue Element Admin, the most popular project of the Vue.js ecosystem, is a solution to build beautiful dashboards using Vue.js components.
vue-cli is the standard solution to build a new Vue.js application, using the modern JavaScript tooling.
It can be compared to Create React App for React but it's more flexible and it provides a Graphical User Interface that makes it very user-friendly.
Not one but two major upgrades in the Angular ecosystem in 2018!
Angular version 6, introduced in May, provides a lot of features related to the tooling.
As a consequence, the trendiest project of the Angular ecosystem was Angular CLI the official command line tool used to scaffold new projects and manage existing projects.
Among the new features, the update command makes it easy to update an application and its dependencies.
Also, it's now possible to customize the underlying Webpack configuration without "ejecting".
Angular version 7 was announced in October.
It includes Angular CLI prompts, an upgrade of Material Design for Angular, and focuses on performance improvements, with a feature called "Virtual Scrolling".
React Native is still the leading solution to create mobile applications using the JavaScript language.
Airbnb recently published a thorough series of article explaining why they decided to drop React Native for their next products in favor of Native Apps.
For people who want to use Vue.js instead of React, there are several choices.
The 4 following projects of the category (Weex, NativeScript, Quasar and Ionic) all support Vue.js as the view layer to build mobile applications.
It's not a JavaScript project because it uses the Dart language but Flutter from Google is a great alternative to build cross-environment mobile applications.
Looking back at 2018, the biggest story in the JavaScript community may be the Event-stream drama, revealed in November.
There were a lot of talks around this drama, about security concerns and the burden of maintaining open-source projects.
Talking about open source, the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft in June was a breaking news.
Over the last months, Microsoft did a lot of moves to become one of the major actors in the JavaScript world, as shown by the success of TypeScript language and VS Code editor.
So it may not be so surprising to see a giant like Microsoft taking control of our beloved GitHub… but what a turnaround in the history of Open Source!
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
Creator of Best of JS
Author of Discover Meteor and creator of Vulcan, a React+GraphQL open-source framework.
Best of JS is a project by Michael Rambeau, made in Osaka, Japan.
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These are the hottest projects of the year, all categories included.
For the third time in a row, Vue.js is the trendiest project of the year.
It got 45k stars overs the last 12 months, it's 5,000 more stars than in 2017... the momentum is still there!
At position number 4, Deno is the only new project among the TOP 10.
Deno is "a program for executing JavaScript and TypeScript outside of the web browser."
According to its creator Ryan Dahl (the father of Node.js), this secure TypeScript runtime is an attempt of addressing several issues about Node.js. Watch his video presentation.