Vue.js is an open-source model–view frontend JavaScript framework designed to build user interfaces and single-page applications with a core library focused only on the view layers. Evan You created and released it in 2014.
A bit of Vue.js history
While working at Google Creative Labs, Evan Yu decided he wants to quickly build a complex interface prototype and needs a tool to avoid writing duplicate HTML. It was the time when React.js just only appeared, AngularJS and Backbone were too cumbersome to prototype, so Evan created his framework. As he claimed later: “I figured, what if I could just extract the part that I liked about Angular and build something really lightweight.” A few years after its release, Vue.js received the highest satisfaction rating among JS frameworks (91.2%). Companies like IBM, GitLab, and Adobe have also started using Vue in their products.
What’s unique about Vue.js?
Vue.js is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other popular frameworks, Vue has been designed from the ground with no need to maintain compatibility with older versions. The main library is focused only on the view layer, making it easy to learn and combine with other libraries or integrate it into existing projects. Besides its high performance, while building a single page app from scratch, it also can be integrated with other web packages and can offer many modern features such as bundling, code-splitting, or tree-shaking.
The most famous products developed with Vue.js
Corporate users of Vue.js software include such best practices and corporations as Grammarly, 9GAG, Behance, Lavarel Spark, Gitlab, Offers.com, Nintendo, Wizzair, TrustPilot, Blinq, EuroNews, Buzzfeed:
- Grammarly is a service that helps people to write better in English. The application scans your text and finds the misspellings, as well as contextual and punctuation errors. All of its features provide a beautiful and simplistic design.
- Behance is owned by an Adobe website that allows artists to publish their artwork, create portfolios, and network with other designers. They use Vue.js to create a platform filled with photographs, designs, and illustrations.
- Laravel Spark is a tool that helps users to control their SaaS applications. It is famous for its SaaS apps features such as Stripe payments, user authentication, plans, coupons, etc. Spark has chosen Vue.js for their application because, as they say, Vue.js ‘makes frontend a joy’.
- Wizzair Airline is an airline that operates in Europe and offers cheap flights. Wizzair uses Vue.js as the JavaScript framework on some of their flight search so that users can make quick flight checks and get a beautiful and lightweight design.
- Gitlab started to use Vue.js in 2016. They reported that using Vue.js results in high performance, reduced page load time, and overall productivity increase.
Vue.js pros and cons
Advantages of Vue.js:
- The library is quite simple and functional. To understand it, you need minimum technical knowledge. Any developer who has a minimal stack of Frontend technology can write in Vue.
- There are no stack requirements; that’s why it’s possible to use Vue.js on any project.
- The framework is very lightweight. We can save the page loading time and get a much better conversion, UX, search rankings, etc.
- High development speed. Thanks to the use of the templates and documentation available, the developers can quickly resolve any problems.
- One of the essential advantages of using Vue.js is its size, as you can end up with a ready-built project that weighs only 20KB after min + gzip.
- It can be resized and scaled according to your needs. Simultaneously, if you want to do any kind of integration or develop a web application, it can use the REST API.
- Vue allows you to create functional applications that meet all modern standards, with the minimal connection of new resources and better prices.
Disadvantages of Vue.js:
- Everything that worked yesterday may be out of date tomorrow. It’s one of Vue’s most significant disadvantages, as developers find it quite complicated and have to learn the environment quite often.
- Excessive flexibility causes more errors in the code. More mistakes and incorrectness mean delays of the projects.
Why UppLabs chose Vue.js?
Having experienced the technology’s critical features in practice, we can prove the Vue framework’s main advantages. We choose Vue.js for our projects because it:
- is an incrementally adoptable ecosystem;
- requires minimal optimization efforts;
- has documentation translated into eight languages, with plenty of detailed code usage examples;
- provides the ability to implement a component approach that accelerates development;
- is progressive and could be gradually introduced into the code.
