The majority of my coding time is spent in the back-end, so to speak. Mostly within a Microsoft environment. When an opportunity arises to discard the shackles of Visual Studio I figuratively leap at the chance.

Lucky for me, just such an opportunity presented itself in the not so distant past. It wasn’t going to be all sweetness Sublime Text and roses Chrome DevTools but enough to whet the appetite for something less, well, less…restrictive (mostly in the sense of the systems that have been built as opposed to the tooling).

Best practices

I haven’t done too much front-end development over the past couple of years so I delved into the depths of my memory (unpleasant) and pulled out what I thought were good practices for writing JavaScript. Things like:

As it happens, these are still good things to be doing. Check out JavaScript The Right Way for more comprehensive information.

DOM manipulation

When it came to manipulating the DOM I instinctively turned to what I had used in the past - JQuery. Chosen as much because I had experience with JQuery as it was because I didn’t have a choice.

The work was completed and I was quite happy with the relatively minimal DOM manipulation I had managed (choosing to show/hide pre-built elements within the page, as opposed to building lots of stuff within JavaScript). However, I was left feeling disappointed the code was not better.

I wanted more. I knew of some front-end JavaScript frameworks (amongst the many hundreds of others):

I was confident I needed to embrace one of them. This would make both myself and the code I produce better than the current situation.

Choices, choices, choices

But which one to try? Sure, I could try them all (and I probably should), however, I wanted to know which to try first.

Colleagues consulted, Google searched, GitHub’s front-end JavaScript frameworks showcase reviewed. There was a clear leader - AngularJS.

Decision made - AngularJS it is

Why? Well, it seems to be The Framework© all the Cool Kids© are using. It’s backed by Google. Using some (admittedly fairly arbitrary) comparisons between the frameworks (all correct at the time of writing) it comes out as a clear leader.

GitHub Stars:

Questions tagged in Stackoverflow:

Google searches over time