The universal question that now puzzles lots of modern developers is which framework to choose to start building successful web apps. And very often, the choice falls on React and Angular, both of which are rightly considered the best of their kind. Below is a brief comparison of React and Angular provided courtesy of Railsware.com, a company that specializes in developing top-notch apps for web and mobile.
What You Can Do with Angular
Angular, as advertised, is a complete framework for either web or mobile. It rolls off the assembly line with everything we need to build large-scale applications out of the box. It’s built on TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, which can be great or terrible depending on whom you ask.
TypeScript is a language that actually compiles down into standard JavaScript. It essentially gives us features of the future to use today, as well as optimizing code for the browser. Remember, once new JavaScript standards are defined, browsers still have to play catch-up and implement those features or make them available to use. TypeScript lets us use these features and then worries about spitting out code that the browser will understand. It’s a strongly typed language that allows developers to specify data types and strict contracts between various pieces of code.
TypeScript can be used with a lot of different tools, even things like React, but the cool thing about Angular is that you can always be sure that all the documentation is defaulted around TypeScript. If you’re using React, and you want to use TypeScript, you might find it hard to find documentation or others doing the same thing.
There’s a couple ways Angular web developers can build a mobile app in this framework. It’s possible to use the Ionic framework, which is a truly hybrid approach that uses the web browser within a native app container to build cross-platform apps. It’s also possible to use NativeScript, which is a native tool with UI that can achieve those 60 frames per second.
One of the main differences between Angular and React is that Angular is a full-fledged toolkit used for creating apps. Out-of-the-box Angular has solutions for routing, accessing data services, templating, and more.
One of the main advantages of Angular is that it is right there for you. And this provides a lot of consistency across your other Angular applications. And for the cons, many developers note that TypeScripts needs to be wrapped in some kind of Angular service to work with other Angular components, which may cause some inconveniences for inexperienced coders.
What You Can Do with React
React takes a different approach to mobile development. In essence, React is just a piece of the puzzle. Its selling point is its use of Virtual DOM and the emphasis on application state. And now you probably want to ask yourself what Virtual DOM is. To answer this question completely, we should take a closer look at Regular DOM for a second.
The Document Object Model, or DOM, is the view representation of all your code. It employs HTML and JavaScript to create what users see on the actual page. The thing about the DOM is that it was never built for modern dynamic web apps. As you know, early websites represented static content and plain text living on a page. These days, we’re really pushing the DOM in ways it wasn’t originally destined for and redefines the original uses of DOM.
That’s where React comes in and saves the day. With React you actually work with the object representation of the DOM. React maintains two snapshots: one being original and the other containing your updated changes. The framework then compares the two to find the difference. It updates only that small piece of code that actually needs to be changed rather than rewriting the entire HTML document. What ends up happening is a huge performance boost
One of the best things about using React js developement is the focus it has on application state. It’s an object that determines how the code renders or behaves. You can think of state as a single source of truth for all the React components. Rather than keeping values and variables that are littered throughout the component or application, they’re maintained in a single object that can be only updated through a special method of set state. You still use variables in React, but state is an object used for anything that’s dynamic, for example, data or Boolean values. What’s more, with React, you can easily debug your app and find a specific state to reproduce some bugs or features.
Since react focuses on the features of Virtual DOM and state, you need to fill in those missing pieces like routing and templating. Luckily, there are tons of React libraries like JSX and React Router. Tools like Create React App make it really easy to create a successful app that already has all these pieces assembled for you. In React, you don’t get that boxed-in feeling you might have with Angular, since it only governs the view layer with the state object. And it doesn’t really care if you want to include another library. The major downside, though, is that a lot of React apps can vary in their composition. With so many tools at your disposal, you may end up having two React apps that differ in appearance and functionality.
And now look at both frameworks, weigh up all the pros and cons, consult with your development team, and then make the right decision.
