When we think about web programming with JavaScript, there is no doubt that popular JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular strike our mind. These JavaScript frameworks apply different structure, flow, and patterns to develop a web app that makes web programming simple and structured. The proper web programming pattern makes the web app scalable and organized in the long run, which is what these frameworks provide.
These frameworks make web programming easier in terms of structure and pattern. But, we still need some modules, libraries, and packages that help us integrate different features in the web app easily without much hassle. There are many packages specifically built on top of these individual frameworks. These packages are to be installed and integrated using the particular framework to give a proper feature in our web app. It is essential to know such efficient packages in each framework construct. These packages offer the UI components and functionalities that make web development using these frameworks easier while making the web app powerful and feature-rich.
Hence, we have listed out some of the best packages out there for each framework so that you can learn about them and apply them to your next project:
- React Toolbox is one of the most useful packages a React developer must know of. This toolbox package helps to provide state-of-the-art React components to build your awesome React UI. This package houses React components whose design elements are based on Google's Material Design UI. The components offered are customizable as well as flexible.
- React Strap - If you are a web developer, you must have come across the popular CSS framework called Bootstrap, which is now at stable version 4+. This package helps you integrate those bootstrap CSS design components into your React app. It delivers an easy way to integrate and use the Bootstrap 4 components in your React project. The UI components offer highly resemble the Bootstrap CSS designs customized to work in the React environment with all the props and states.
- Recharts - If you want any charts integrated and configured to be rendered with datasets in the React app, then this is the right package for you. Recharts package is the chart library that combines React with the D3 JavaScript framework. Its main aim is to offer useful and dynamic chart components so that developers can easily use chart diagrams in the React app. The charts are provided as React components with native SVG support as well.
- Prime React - Another UI components library here that changes the overall UI-theming boundary of a React app. This package offers the ultimate collection of design-agnostic, flexible, and accessible React UI Components. Numerous UI components exist for form designs, data representation, menus, charts, buttons, etc. The UI design elements offered are unique to any other package, enabling us to build well-crafted unique views using the components from this library into our React app.
- Styled Component - The library that enables developers to write CSS designs with more power and innovation. The styled component harnesses the power of tagged template literals, a recent addition to JavaScript, along with the power of CSS that allows developers to write actual CSS codes into the UI components. It redeems styles as the higher-level elements, with components being the low-level constructs. The plus point is that it removes the mapping between components and styles, making applying CSS styles easy.
- React Hook Form - Form is an essential component in any web app that helps to gain user interaction. Almost all the websites available will have some form component built into them to get user-related data. Since the forms are an essential element of a web app, why not make forms powerful with this react-hook-form package? This package offers performant, flexible, and extensible forms. The validation rules can be easily applied to the form elements. It offers a native form of experience with sustainable performance. The integration steps are simple and match the HTML standard for validation.
- Now, Formik is one of the most popular packages regarding forming handling in the React app. It offers declarative, intuitive, and adaptable form elements that will enable you to build dynamic forms in React Native easily. With this package, a developer does not need to worry about repetitive and annoying stuff like keeping track of form values, errors, validation, and submission. You will be able to concentrate more on the business logic part of the issue rather than the state change handling.
- React Query - With React Hooks becoming more and more popular with the availability of Hook feature for everything, here is a new hook in a place called React Query. The main function of this hook is to fetch, cache, and update asynchronous data in the React app. It allows agnostic data fetching applicable for data from RestAPIs, GraphQL, promises, and whatnot. The feature of auto-caching and re-fetching is the real deal that simplifies most of our data fetching problems. This package's highlight features are parallel and dependent queries, mutations, reactive query re-fetching, multi-layer cache, automatic garbage collection, and many more.
- React Table - Now, when it comes to rendering dynamic and powerful table components in the React app, the React Table package might be your best bet. This package offers the React Hooks for building lightweight, fast, and extendable data grids for React. The components and data integration hooks are highly customizable with fully controllable APIs. Some powerful and must-have features in a table, such as sorting, filtering, pivoting and aggregation, row selection, row expansion, column order, etc, are provided out of the box. They can be customized based on the dataset. The table element offered also can be animated, virtualized, and resized based on the need for the UI view rendering. Overall, a powerful and dependable package for integrating table components in the React app.
- React Beautiful dnd - The drag and drop feature in any web app makes the web app more intuitive and easy to use. The drag-and-drop features are mostly used when uploading some files to the system. But, here, we are talking about a different kind of drag and drops that will be applied to list elements in the web UI. This react-beautiful-dnd package offers beautiful and accessible drag and drops for lists in React. It enables the power to drag the list items from one list, drop it to another, and drag the list items among the items of the same list. The drag-and-drop motion is intuitive with great performance. However, the functionality and components offered are not customizable.
- Bootstrap Vue - Bootstrap is the popular CSS framework used widely for styling the components of the web app. We can directly integrate the Bootstrap CSS library into Vue, but it can be a hassle to download the stylesheet files, move them to the Vue project, and then integrate it into the Vue ecosystem. This process can be made simple just by using the bootstrap-vue package. This package enables us to integrate the bootstrap CSS library into the Vue project easily. It offers more than 85 components, over 45 available plugins, several directives, and 1000+ icon customize to fit the Vue ecosystem. Moreover, the bootstrap CSS classes also can be easily used in the project along with custom bootstrap-vue elements.
- Element - Another popular Vue2.0 based component library providing state-of-the-art UI components and themes. It is a Desktop Based UI library built for Vue. The UI components offered by Element are beautiful and modern, with plugins to apply functionalities. The components are customizable with the use of various component attributes that come with the component. However, the component design is itself not customizable with something completely new. Most importantly, the UI elements provided will enable us to build a modern and intuitive web app that looks captivating to the eye of the users.
- Vue Tailwind - Tailwind CSS is a low-level CSS framework that is highly customizable. It gives you all the building blocks you need to build your designs without any hindrances of opinionated styles that become a hassle to override. The vue-tailwind package allows us to link tailwind CSS with the Vue ecosystem. With tailwind CSS at our disposal, the components become highly customizable. You will have the ability to customize the UI components based on your needs and taste. All the VueTailwind components were designed to be customized with custom CSS classes and unlimited variants. You can customize them while importing the library or using the component.
- Vuetify - Now comes the Vuetify, which is one of the most popular and powerful UI components library built for Vue. Vuetify puts the material design UI components at your disposal. They provide a massive amount of carefully crafted UI components so that you can build rich and engaging user experiences. It adopts a mobile-first approach to design so that the application we built is compatible with any device platform. The Vuetify community is just massive, which will help you solve any issue if you ever encounter one. So, this might be the best UI library for those who are into building design elements quickly without much effort to be applied.
- Vue Draggable - If you are looking for a package that helps you integrate a list-based drag-and-drop feature into the Vue ecosystem, then this package is the right one for you. Vue Draggable is the Vue component or directive allowing drag-and-drop and synchronization with the view model array. It houses the additional features of the Sortable.js package as well. With this package, one can easily drag and drop items from one array list to another, which also supports touch functionality.
- Ant Design Vue - Ant Design library is known to offer UI design components for enterprise-level products. The primary package was officially designed for the React framework. But now, with this ant-design-vue package, we can use the enterprise-level UI components to the Vue ecosystem as well. This gives Vue the ability to deliver an enterprise-level UI experience and interactivity. One will be able to set high-quality Vue components out of the box as well as share the Ant Design for React resources as well.
- Vue Resource - Well, if you are a Vue developer and using HTTP request and response, you might not have missed the vue-resource package because it does that. It provides services for making web requests and handles responses using an XMLHttpRequest or JSON. It is one of the essential packages when we are dealing with APIs in the Vue web app. It supports features like Promise APIs and URI templates. It also facilitates the functionality to intercept the request and response and modify the payload headers.
- V-charts - This is Vue's chart package. If you want the chart or graphical representations of data in your Vue app then, this package can be the right choice for you. The chart components offered by this package uses a uniform data format applicable for both the front end and backend. The configuration that can be made to the chart has been simplified. It also delivers the option of customization to various chart components in the offer.
- Vee-validate - Being a developer, we know that validating inputs and displaying errors can a hassle sometimes. It is a lengthy and tedious task when we do it ourselves. But this package makes it easier. The vee-validate package is a template-based validation framework built on top of Vue.js. It enables us to validate inputs and easily display errors. Since the package offers template-based validation, we need to specify what type of validators should be used for each input field when the value changes and the errors are displayed automatically if it occurs. On top of that, the package supports more than 40 locales which is just amazing for the internationalization of our Vue app.
- Vue-i18n - The vue-i18n package is the internationalization plugin for the Vue ecosystem. It enables developers to integrate localization features into the Vue application easily. Hence, with this plugin's help, multi-language supporting Vue apps can be built without much hassle. This means more reach globally for your application. It is an important package if you are developing an app for users of specific language backgrounds.
- Primeface - This may just be one of the best UI component libraries out there for Angular. PrimeNG offers dynamic, elegant, and powerful UI components to build the Angular app. The components in the offer are highly customizable and accessible. They improve an Angular app's looks, features, and performance. Even the website offering all the details of the UI components looks awesome. So, you should know why to use this open-source UI components library to power up your next Angular app.
- Ngxbootstrap - Bootstrap is the CSS framework that has touched every boundary regarding web technologies. The bootstrap framework library is always configured and ready for use by any web techs. And here is one for Angular as well. This package offers the bootstrap UI components for the Angular app. Rather than downloading resources from bootstrap itself, we can use this package to integrate bootstrap into an Angular project without much hassle easily. The components offer flexibility and elegance, great for any angular app.
- Ngx-easy-table - Now, here is the Table component library for Angular. It simply makes the implementation of table views in the Angular app easy and dynamic. The table component in the offer is simply robust, with many state-of-the-art features available out of the box. You can customize each nook and corner of the table and apply features like sorting, filtering, paginations, and asynchronous data loading out of the box. It is simply the best package if you are looking to integrate a table into your Angular app.
- Ng2-fontawesome - If you are an experienced web or mobile app developer, you have probably realized that any web or mobile applications look incomplete and tasteless with icons. Icons play an integral role in giving life to the overall web or a mobile app. Hence, this package here offers a bundle of font awesome icon packages for you to use for your angular app. Fontawesome readily provides awesome and high-quality icon packages for you to choose from. So, if you want to integrate the Fontawesome icon package into your angular project, this one is for you.
- ng2 chart - Like every other framework, here is the chart package for the Angular framework. This package offers state-of-the-art chart components and configuration options specifically for Angular apps. Their chart components are amazing and easy to integrate with customizable features. The library is based on the popular chart.js library. They also offer a starting template for each one of their chart types with different properties and dynamic theming as well.
- ng2 file upload - We all know that the upload and download file feature can be a hassle when implementing the UI as well as functionality by ourselves. Well, this package makes thing simpler for the Angular app. With this, you will get the file upload component at your disposal which you can easily integrate into your app interface. This component allows the file to be selected from the local drive and uploaded to your desired web server. Mind you that this package does not offer the download feature.
- ng2 handsontable - Now, another package offers tables like grid structure for your angular app. This package offers a data grid component similar to an excel sheet. It integrates with any data source and delivers robust features like data validation, sorting, grouping, data binding, or column order. Overall, a hands-on great package to use for integrating tabular view in an Angular project.
- Ngx dropdown - A dropdown component allows you to take space out of any web or mobile app. Dropdown components enable us to prevent the space taken by menu options because it will allow you to list all the menu options as dropdown items. So, they help to make the UI interface clean and intuitive. And this package offers the dropdown component for the angular app. The dropdown component was implemented using bootstrap 3 and doesn't depend on jQuery for execution. There is also an option to create your CSS class and modify the dropdown if you do not want to use the bootstrap CSS designs.
- Formly - A package delivering the form view component is essential for any web technology. And, here it is for the angular framework itself. Formerly is the form package which allows an angular developer to integrate state-of-the-art dynamic and robust forms into their angular app. There is also an option for choosing different themes for the form component. It also offers custom form field validation with error messages. It makes the form implementation in an Angular app simple and more efficient.
- Ng-snotify -The ng-snotify is the package for Angular that offers Toast component. Toasts are simple alert dialogues that pop out in a web or mobile app after completing any task. They are great at displaying notifications, errors, and confirmation messages. This Toast package for angular offers nine different types of toast components. The toast can be positioned anywhere on the screen with multiple config options. The component is highly customizable with the integration of animations as well. Overall, a great toast package to have for Angular developers.
Conclusion
With the endless development of new Web technologies and JavaScript technologies, developing a web app has never been more structured, simpler, and efficient. When developing powerful websites using any web tech like React, Vue, or Angular, the libraries and packages they offer play an essential role.
The available packages make integrating any complex feature into a web app simpler and more efficient, saving a lot of time and energy. Hence, developing these essential packages and libraries requires web tech communities to grow, be active, and be innovative. We all should contribute so that more efficient and optimized packages are developed in the future and keep these amazing frameworks alive.