Table of Contents
- Why will Vue.js keep growing?
- Gentle Learning Curve
- Modular and Flexible Development Environment
- Pleasure to Develop
- Rich Ecosystem and Versatility
- Mobile Development
- Reactivity
- High Performance of Built Applications
- HTML Templates
- Vibrant Community
- Simple Art of Mastering Vue
- Vue Is Evolving
- Who’s Using Vue?
- Should I Add Vue.js to My Tech Stack?
In 2024, ten years since its’ inception, Vue.js is still widely used for web app development and custom mobile apps. With over 200k stars on GitHub, it continues to be one of the most popular Javascript front-end frameworks. When it comes to overall popularity, React is still the king, and Angular, thanks to its specificity, holds a solid place. Yet, Vue is getting more traction every month and as a Vue.js company, we know all the reasons behind it - find out yourself why it’s worth using Vue in 2024.
Vue might have started as a small project driven by the developer needs of its creator, Evan You, but it has matured considerably over the years—becoming a full-fledged framework with a grownup ecosystem and developer tooling. Along the way, Vue attracted a decent number of contributors, sponsors, evangelists and official partners.
On the JS front-end framework battlefield, however, React wins with Vue.js in terms of popularity and commercial usage. Yet, there’s no doubt Vue is here to stay and is slowly but progressively stepping into developers’ reality. Vue is getting traction in the technology community because the core team really takes care of providing the best developer's experience possible.
It’s been a long journey since 2014, with lots of challenges but every time we added something, we tried to sustain the core experience of using Vue.
Why will Vue.js keep growing?
By building on the best ingredients of Angular and React and adding its own unique spice to the mix, Vue turned out tasty enough to induce constant appetite in JS developers. It does provide some unique (compared to React/Angular) possibilities like incremental implementation into an existing project, or ease of creating and maintaining small apps (not to mention beginner-friendliness).
Let's take a look at all the reasons for choosing Vue.js development in 2024.
Gentle Learning Curve
Vue’s gentle learning curve steals the hearts of beginners and advanced developers. The software developers we asked in our State of Vue.js report said the learning curve is what sparks so much interest around Vue. After going over the materials included in the official guide, you can go ahead and start making your first Vue app—no prior knowledge of ES2015, TypeScript, JSX, or build systems is required.
All you really need to get going is a basic understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Although not necessary, some experience with using frameworks is also welcome, even more so if you’re after building more complex web apps (more on that later).
Vue’s high accessibility helps fast-paced dev teams get all their creative juices going without having to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with additional syntax extensions. Putting together a team for a project or integrating Vue into one is easier and faster. Even though there aren’t many Vue developers on the market yet, developers experienced in React can easily switch to Vue and start delivering value within more or less a week.
Vue also cuts the time required to grasp the complexity common to, for example, Angular, which is particularly handy when writing simple web apps.
Modular and Flexible Development Environment
Web apps in Vue are built with the use of components. While it already gives devs lots of flexibility and adaptability as per project needs, Vue’s single-file components are loosely coupled, which improves code reuse and decreases development time.
Component-based architecture is ideal for building apps with the intention of future scaling. In Vue, building large-scale apps requires using a modularized build system from the get-go. But Vue gives devs some flexibility here because the bundlers recommended by Vue, Webpack or Browserify, come with the ability to later transform the source code with preprocessors of your choice.
Pleasure to Develop
At Monterail, our devs frequently highlight the sheer pleasure with which they build apps in Vue. The freedom to structure the code as it pleases the developer and the unopinionated way of coding are the main reasons why there’s so much love for Vue.
Sorting through the codebase is hassle-free—practically everything you need is inside the .vue file. From the data model and template to CSS, properties, computed values, and methods, getting to know the job of a component spares you with an additional headache.
Rich Ecosystem and Versatility
With a rich collection of libraries and a set of tools facilitating development, the Vue world has everything a developer needs. The more notable tools that amplify coding experience are the excellent Vuex for state management and vue-routing for routing and mapping your single-page app states to respective URLs.
Vue also has its own DevTools, which come in the form of a browser extension. DevTools simplify application debugging and checking the state and hierarchy of components. They allow you to live-edit your app, track custom events, and time-travel debug your app to see previous versions and the changes made.
Mobile Development
Vue offers developers a few solutions for cross-platform mobile UI development. There’s Weex, created by the e-commerce platform Alibaba, and NativeScript with its vast repository of tools, components, and plugins. Recently, Ionic, too, came aboard the Vue mobile development team.
In contrary to React Native’s “Learn once, write anything”, both Weex and NativeScript say “Write it once, run it anywhere”. This approach enables you to manage the UI in a transparent and repeatable way between multiple platforms. That’s quite awesome.
Reactivity
Data in various HTML elements renders dynamically in modern web apps. Vue is equipped with its proprietary reactivity mechanism that refreshes the user interface automatically. This approach saves a lot of time and additional lines of code that the developer can use to focus on introducing other features and be more productive.
High Performance of Built Applications
Vue.js is fast. It’s not the fastest framework in the hood, but what’s currently available with Vue.js is plenty enough to deliver impeccable UX in SPAs as well as UIs.
In the mobile apps world, Vue launches applications faster than Angular and React. Since 53% of users abandon mobile sites that take more than 3 seconds to load and the web is shifting toward a mobile-first experience, Vue’s speed is an important perk to consider when choosing a JavaScript front-end framework.
HTML Templates
This is somewhat debatable, but Vue’s HTML-based templates increase productivity, especially for those of us with an HTML background. Vue’s templates also help to introduce reactivity features into existing web apps. The templates are compiled by Vue to have the virtual DOM render functionality. As a result, during app state change, Vue introduces a minimum number of manipulations to the DOM.
Vibrant Community
Vue’s community is blooming and actively contributing to the development of the framework. Several big conferences take place annually all over the world that are devoted wholly to Vue. The 2017’s VueConf in Wrocław, Poland, which we helped to organize ignited the Vue-related conference storm all over the world.
Here are some of the upcoming conferences worth checking out:
- Vue.js London - 10/4-5/2019
- Vue Fes, Japan - 10/12/2019
- VueConfTO Toronto - 11/11-12/2019
- Vue.js Amsterdam - 2/20/2020
But the community also organizes not just full-blown conferences. Vue meetups happen in multiple countries on six continents. Over a beer or coffee, Vue developers can exchange their knowledge and experiences with using the framework.
Simple Art of Mastering Vue
Vue.js has downright excellent official documentation that lets developers discover pretty much every aspect of Vue and its ecosystem. The official guide has examples and detailed descriptions. API docs target most issues devs might encounter while coding.
Tutorials
Aside from learning Vue via the official guide, you can also master the art of coding in Vue by using some of the available tutorials, with videos and examples included. The free courses guide you through Vue in a thorough and fun manner—especially Scrimba (recommended by Vue).
Other courses that will make you love Vue:
Intro to Vue.js by Vue Mastery
Vue on Laracasts
Vue.js on Tutorialspoint
StackOverflow and Official Chat
For various code riddles not covered in courses and tutorials, you can ask a question on StackOverflow. New questions and answers pop up all the time, so there’s a good chance you will get your question answered regardless of its complexity.
And when you’re stuck with a pressing coding issue you won’t be left alone—you can ask fellow coders for help on the official Vue chat and receive a prompt answer.
Vue Is Evolving
Since its launch in 2014, a lot of developers were reluctant to adopt Vue for fear of its abandonment, leaving everyone involved with the painstaking and costly task of merging into another framework. But that, of course, didn’t happen. In September, Evan You announced Vue.js 3.0. And even though there’s no definite release date as of yet, what’s important about the update is that it’s based on contribution and public feedback. Without the corporate backing of known brands, Vue’s rapid rate of evolvement is a remarkable feat.
Vue’s ecosystem is getting bigger and better, gaining more and more appreciation from developers and businesses alike.
Who’s Using Vue?
Vue.js may not yet be the most popular JavaScript front-end framework, but it’s been embraced by big names such as Alibaba, Grammarly, Xiaomi, Laracasts, and Reuters. You can browse through plenty of UI components, websites, templates, plugins, apps and what have you that were built with Vue to get an even better understanding of Vue’s awesomeness.
As for support in the back-end part of the field, Laravel, the PHP framework, recommends using Vue.js for front-end development, although it’s not a requirement.
Should I Go For Vue.js Services?
In short, yes. Opting for Vue.js development services or partnering with a Vue.js company is a good choice. However, it's worth noting that Vue.js is not the only standout front-end JS framework. It’s a good idea to test and explore a few frameworks to determine which one best suits your web application needs
While Vue isn’t flawless, it’s very close. If you're considering factors like ease of learning, long-term maintenance, and enhanced developer productivity, Vue.js shines like nothing else.