Developer’s choice: an overview of the best front-end frameworks in 2020

The choice of a JavaScript framework always depends on project-specific requirements.

You should take into consideration various aspects: its footprint, performance, reusability, and, not of the least, community support.

Knowing how difficult it’s to always keep up with the trend, we’ve decided to make a list of the best front-end frameworks based on the personal experience and opinion of the developer’s community.

Let’s put a spotlight on these top five frameworks and libraries:

React
Vue
Angular
Backbone
Ember

React

Whether you are a beginner or an experienced front-end developer, you would have definitely heard of React.

Created by Facebook developers with the initial intention to make their code more efficient, currently React is a leading front-end framework and the fastest growing technology. This is not surprising as it greatly simplifies the process of building rich and interactive UIs for web applications.

The results of the State of JavaScript 2018 show that during 2016-2018 years the popularity of React kept growing gradually.

What is great is that it’s backed up by the large community of developers from all around the world.

Moreover, the framework is completely user-friendly for newcomers – the guides help to cope with any difficulties that occur during the learning. Therefore, you can learn the basics of React in a few hours and master its advanced aspects with detailed documentation further.

Alongside React, developers tend to use ES6, Redux state management library, Express, Jest and React Native for a seamless mobile experience.

Developers love React for these features:

Component-based architecture.
An elegant style of programming and declarative views that help to produce a clear and maintainable code.
Rapid performance due to one-way data binding which makes manipulating with the virtual DOM faster.
Effective event handling.
JSX – a markup syntax that keeps writing components uncomplicated.
Adoption and popularization of a functional paradigm that eases the development and makes the management of application states more predictable.
SEO-friendliness.

On top of that, it’s a good choice if you have to deal with real-time data in your application.

We’ve picked articles that will help you get started with React and learn more about it from a developer’s perspective:

Vue

Despite being a young framework, Vue continues to get more and more attention every month from developer’s community. It has become more stable years after the initial launch and succeeded in bringing value to a lot of startups and enterprise companies. Yes, React and Angular still win Vue in terms of overall popularity and try to put the latter in the shade, but Vue becomes gradually adopted by software developers. According to the State of JS 2018, around 50% of respondents would like to learn this framework and not without a reason.

Vue is appreciated mainly for its gentle learning curve and reduced complexity thanks to which building simple web applications takes little time. It makes the components reactive, meaning any changes applied to the state object are visible in the rendered HTML in a flash.

Good news for React and Angular developers: switching to Vue is easy as it shares concepts of both frameworks.

Other Vue’s strengths are:

A component-oriented structure that encapsulates reusable code, gives flexibility and ensures easy scaling.
Reactive mechanisms that help to keep the state object in full synchronization with the view and the DOM.
Solutions for mobile UI development.
The tiny size of the framework. It ships at only 18-21 KB.
Helps to keep the structure of a project simple.
Easy integration into JavaScript applications.

The last but not the least is the comprehensive documentation that covers pretty much all the features of Vue and its ecosystem. An active and ever-growing community that contributes to the development of the framework is its undeniable strength.

All in all, if you are looking for a lightweight and progressive framework which is easy to start with, Vue is a great option to try.

To dive deeper into aspects of development with Vue, we recommend reading the following articles:

Angular

Angular is an open-source platform for building user interfaces. It’s essential for large enterprise-scale projects and holds the top positions among front-end frameworks.

Initially, it was developed by Google engineers in 2009 and was known as AngularJS.

Later, in 2016, the framework was rewritten and started to fit the requirements of modern web development. The development team keeps releasing new versions again and again. The current version is Angular 7.0. Angular is a part of the MEAN stack that covers four major software development pillars: MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js

But one should take into account that Angular more suitable for building complex long-term apps rather than SPAs as it requires a steep learning curve.

In the heart of Angular is TypeScript – a language that makes the code easier to maintain as it provides with a type system and reliable type checking. As TypeScript is updated independently from browsers, you don’t need to rely on the browser and can use all new features of the language.

Alongside the framework itself, developers use such tools as RxJS for handling asynchronous data and Angular CLI for easy creating projects, debugging and deployment.

Features for which you will love Angular are:

Component-based architecture that reminds of MVC but makes components reusable, encapsulates the code and make it more productive.
Two-way data binding that synchronizes the model with the view and removes the need to write excessive code.
Hierarchical dependency injection makes components reusable and easy to maintain.
Designed with the mobile-first approach.
Rapid performance. However, it highly depends on the quality of the code.
The template syntax that is easy to write and read.
Components that ensure easy unit-testing.
Active and large community.
Suitable for iterative development.

All in all, Angular is an awesome front-end technology for your project if you are building complex systems but not so convenient for creating fast-changing user interfaces. For the latter case, it’s better to use React and Vue which are more lightweight and have an easier learning curve. However, Angular’s steep learning curve is compensated by the reliability of the resulting software.

To get a better understanding of Angular, we recommend diving into these articles:

Comparing popularity

Google Trends gives a good idea of how the popularity of Angular, React and Vue has been changing over the last five years:

To help you choose between these three frameworks, we recommend reading the following articles:

Backbone

Backbone.js is an open-source JavaScript library initially released in 2010. It’s acknowledged remarkably lightweight as it ships at 7.5KB and depends only on two other JS libraries – Underscore.js and jQuery. It’s licensed under MIT and everyone can contribute to its development.

Although it has been really trendy right after release, its popularity started to decline with the growth of React, Vue.js, and Angular. The results of the State of JS Survey show that it’s not among the top three most popular frameworks but nevertheless, it’s appreciated by many developers as it gives a structure to web applications. Trello, Soundcloud, Airbnb, and many other companies choose to use Backbone as a front-end technology.

Why use Backbone

As an intensive use of JavaScript makes the code difficult to organize and maintain, Backbone helps to overcome this problem by keeping business logic apart from the user interface and makes applications well-structured. In other words, it maintains the backbone of your application.

Models, Views, Collections, Events, Routers, and Sync are the basic components of the framework. It abstracts the DOM into views, data into models and binds them using events. Thankfully to communication via events, the entire code becomes easy to read and maintain.

Other fundamental features are:

Key-value bindings for models.
Model-view-presenter (MVP) design pattern.
Real-time synchronization with the back-end of your app.
A RESTful JSON interface for a server-client communication.

One more advantage is that you can use a template engine of your choice with Backbone.

Though Backbone is not so actively updated these days, the bugs are fixed and the documentation is updated systematically.

All things considered, Backbone is a great choice for building both single page applications (SPAs) and complex client-side applications.

Want to learn more about Backbone? Here is a list of articles that are worth your attention:

Ember

Ever heard about Ember?

Your favorite Apple Music is built with Ember. Netflix, LinkedIn, and Microsoft and many other popular websites use Ember.

Ember.js is a free JavaScript client-side framework released in 2011.

Being designed for creating scalable SPAs, desktop, and mobile apps, it comes together with a set of tools that make up a complete development stack. With Ember’s conventions and out-of-the-box features, developers can focus more on the functionality of their apps rather than sorting out how to configure them.

Here’s the list of Ember.js strengths:

Built on MVVM pattern.
Compatible with Babel – a JavaScript transpiler.
Stability without stagnation is one of the core principles of Ember. It’s backward compatible with the older versions of the framework.
Beautiful templates which make the user interface of your application stand out. They are written with Handlebars – a comprehensible templating language.
Declarative two-way data binding. Templates are updated immediately once the underlying model’s data is changed.
More than 5000 of awesome plugins available in Ember’s plugin repository. You don’t need to build from scratch an add-on – simply install it. One of the most popular is Ember-simple-auth for authentication and authorization management.
Ember-CLI is another tool for enhancing productivity. It’s a command line utility that supports CoffeeScript, LESS, Sass, Handlebars, and more.
Rich ecosystem and vibrant community.
Computed properties that allow declaring functions as properties. It’s a powerful approach for creating new values.
Object system that simplifies the understanding of inheritance and mixins.
Easy refactoring of templates into reusable components.

Ember is built with productivity in mind and proves to be one of the most flexible frameworks nowadays. Try Ember to see whether it’s suitable for your app.

Learn more about Ember:

Comparing popularity

It can be easily noticed that Ember overtakes Backbone in popularity:

Which frameworks are the fastest?

If you’re eager to know which frameworks are the best in terms of speed and performance, we recommend digging deeper into the detailed performance benchmark results.

Final words

As developers, we know how overwhelming and challenging the process of choosing the JS framework can be.

When comparing multiple frameworks, you need to figure out how steep/gentle the learning curve is, what the nucleus of its ecosystem is, what kind of performance it provides, and more.

All the above-mentioned frameworks and libraries widen opportunities in creating outstanding UI-first applications. Now it’s your turn to decide which one is perfect for your project.

You can find more tutorials & courses for all these frameworks on GitConnected.

Prettify the data

No data analysis starts without data preparation. Take a look at your data first – does everything suit you? If not, let’s put it in good shape.

Firstly, we recommend converting CSV data to JSON since this format opens up more opportunities for customization of the way fields are displayed on the grid.

Next, define the first object in the JSON array that will be responsible for setting data types and captions for the fields. Using a separate object in the data source for defining the view and properties of the fields helps avoid manual renaming fields. You can learn more details about its structure in the Data types in JSON guide.

Create a report

It’s time to pick the hierarchies you want to see on the grid. With the Field List, place them into rows, columns, and measures. Next, apply filtering to display only those hierarchies that satisfy your goals. To see the most relevant records first, sort them in ascending or descending order.

Don’t worry – you can easily arrange the fields differently with the drag-and-drop feature and look at the data from another angle at any time.

Format values

When averaging values, the numbers will likely have a lot of digits after the comma. And this is where number formatting comes in handy. Simply select the measure of interest and set needed options to beautify it:

You can also add the currency symbol and arrange its position.

Highlight values

In addition to sorting, you can emphasize values that speak most. Apply conditional formatting for this:

Now it’s easy to see in which cities animal charities have the highest revenue.

Check results

Voila! The report is ready to be presented to the audience. You can save it in JSON to restore work later or export to Excel, PDF, PNG, or HTML and share it with your colleagues.

Play with code?

Interact with a ready-to-use reporting solution on CodePen.

You can experience the full flexibility of the pivot table tool due to the dynamic nature of reports. Slice and dice your data to gain new insights about the data related to activities of charitable organizations across the USA.

About WebDataRocks

WebDataRocks is available at no cost for any kind of web project.

To dive deeper into its functionality, check out the UI Guide – it covers every feature you have access through the interface.

You can also find more information on interacting with the component via API and integrating with frameworks in the API Reference and the Available Tutorials section.

If you’d like to try creating a dashboard with a pivot table, graphs, maps, and charts, we have something for you as well – a list of guides on integration with charting libraries.

In the previous blog post, we defined a technology stack and discussed why it’s important to choose the right one for web application development.

Now it’s time to discover the most prevalent technologies that are valued both by startups and large enterprises.

Let’s dive in our top of tech stacks you should draw attention to in 2020.

MEAN

Undoubtedly, the MEAN stack is the most popular full-stack solution. Being entirely JavaScript-powered, it brings numerous benefits to web developers among which is the usage of a single language throughout your stack. Another strong advantage is that all the underlying technologies are free and open-source. The community around it is vibrant and active. If any issue arises during the development, you can always rely on its support.

MEAN presents a modern approach for developing fast and robust apps. Besides, all the components of MEAN speak JSON which makes the data flow smoothly between the layers.

Using one language (JavaScript) both for client-side and server-side development improves the communication inside the team and helps to understand your product holistically.

Now let’s break down its structure and take a closer look at its components.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database. Unlike relational databases, it stores data as JSON-like documents. Developers appreciate this database for these key advantages:

Scalability. MongoDB offers scale-out features, automatic sharding, and replica set to maintain constant availability
Flexibility. Since it’s schemaless, there is no need to predefine schema. Yet, it’s recommended.
Short learning curve. The process of configuring MongoDB is easy. Besides, MongoDB query syntax is easy.
Performance. Due to the flexibility of JSON documents, developers can work significantly faster. Besides, documents make apps fast since all the data for an object is stored in a single document.

MongoDB copes well with big data. Due to being horizontally scalable, it fits perfectly mobile and social networking sites, e-commerce product catalogs, and any apps that rely heavily on geospatial data.

Express.js

Express.js is a back-end web app framework that supports and hosts Node.js projects. It assists in organizing your app into an MVC architecture on the server-side. The main task of Express.js is to manage the workflow between the client-side and the data model, ensuring easy transferring of data to end-users.

Being written in JavaScript, it’s cross-platform, free and open-source. Lots of features are available for web and mobile apps.

With Express, it’s easy to build a robust API. Another thing to love Express.js for is its incredibly accurate error handling.

AngularJS / Angular

Angular is a front-end framework, developed and maintained by Google. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019, it’s in the topmost used web development frameworks.

Angular extends the syntax of HTML, runs JavaScript code in the browser and serves to make your app’s UI dynamic and interactive. It’s mostly favored by the well-tuned performance and templates that are perfect for building the front end of cloud-native apps.

NodeJS

NodeJS is an open-source cross-platform engine for building server-side applications. It’s the true backbone of the MEAN stack. NodeJS serves as an integrated web server for the smooth deployment of MongoDB and the app itself to the cloud.

According to the results of Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey 2019, NodeJS tops the rating of the most favorable frameworks, libraries, and tools.

With NodeJS, you can breath more functionality into your app. Built on top of Google’s V8 JS engine, it’s acknowledged as one of the most efficient and lightweight server-side frameworks. It improves runtime performance and successfully handles data-intensive tasks which leads to faster app development and better scalability. NodeJS comes with the largest repository of libraries – npm.

NodeJS is often preferred for microservice architectures. Therefore, it’s appreciated by enterprises and large-scale projects.

Companies that use the MEAN stack are PayPal, LinkedIn, Netflix, and the New York Times.

MERN

In its essence, the MERN stack is the same as MEAN stack but with Angular replaced by React. As well as MEAN, it successfully covers the full development process – from front end to back end.

React

Developed and maintained by Facebook, React is one of the most popular frameworks for building interactive UIs. It’s appreciated by the reusability of components, high performance, and smooth learning curve.

MEVN

In this version of MEAN, Angular is replaced with Vue.js as a frontend framework.

Vue.js

Vue.js is rapidly gaining popularity during recent years. It embodies the best features of React and Angular. Its key advantages are a non-steep learning curve, excellent performance, neat programming style and a rich ecosystem of tools.

LAMP

The LAMP stack is an industry-standard. It’s recognized for its performance, flexibility, and open-source nature. LAMP is often chosen for improving operational efficiency and reducing IT infrastructure costs.

Let’s take a look at its structural components.

Linux

Linux is an operating system and a first layer of the stack. All subsequent layers run on top of it.

Apache

Apache is an open-source and free HTTP server that transfers the content between the server and client machines upon request. To be precise, it fetches the content from the server, turns it to static HTML files and returns it to the browser.

To be precise, it’s not a physical server but a software that operates on the server. It establishes a connection between a server and browsers of users (Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc).

Since Apache is a cross-platform software, it works on Unix and Windows servers.

Due to its module-based structure, it can be customized to enable security, caching, password authentication, etc.

MySQL

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS). It stores information that can be requested to build a website.

PHP

PHP is a programming language. Instead, you can use a similar web programming language, e.g., Perl or Python.

All these layers are open-source and free products. However, since the stack can run smoothly on any operating system, you can choose different modifications and variations of the same stack:

WAMP (Windows OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
MAMP (Mac OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
WISA (Windows, IIS, SQL, ASP.NET)
BAMP (BSD, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
XAMPP (distribution that contains MariaDB, PHP, and Perl)
SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

RoR (Ruby on Rails)

Ruby on Rails is a web framework written over Ruby – a dynamic programming language with an elegant syntax. With Ruby on Rails, you can build a complete web application by combining HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby.

Ruby on Rails has a lot of supporters since it makes writing and debugging code faster and easier. The greatest thing is that Ruby developers can reap benefits from open source tools that speed up development.

Signature stacks

Now that we considered standard solution stacks, let’s discover which bundles of technologies stand behind popular web apps. The following combinations of technologies can be categorized as “signature stacks”.

Uber Tech Stack

Web server: NGINX, Apache
Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Server-side framework: Node.js
Programming languages: Python, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C

Reddit Tech Stack

Server: NGINX
Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis
Server-side framework: Node.js
Programming languages: JavaScript, Python

Pinterest Tech Stack

Programming Languages: Python, Java, Go
Framework: Django, Javascript MVC
Databases: MySQL, Hadoop, HBase, Memcached, Redis
Server: NGINX

Facebook Tech Stack

Programming Languages: PHP, GraphQL, Hack
Framework: Tornado
Databases: Cassandra, RocksDB, Beringei, Memcached
Server: custom/proprietary

Airbnb Tech Stack

Programming Languages: JavaScript, Ruby
Framework: Rails
Databases: MySQL, Amazon RDS, Hadoop
Server: NGINX

This time we covered the time-tested tech stacks that are used widely across modern applications. The right tech stack directly affects the success of your project. Hopefully, today you’ve got the step closer to finding your perfect match.

Empower your tech stack with analytics

If your app needs analytical and reporting features, you can always rely on WebDataRocks. Integrating with any front-end technology of your technology stack is as simple as ABC – check out available tutorials to make sure how seamless the entire process is.

We continue our blog series on discovering awesome data visualization types. This tutorial suits everyone who wants to understand their geographic data better.

Today we’ll focus on using one of the most popular visualization techniques for geospatial data – a choropleth map. And not only you’ll learn how to use this chart to represent the geodata but also how to efficiently combine it with a pivot table on a dashboard.

Here’s what you’ll get as a result:

See the Pen WebDataRocks Pivot Table with Google Charts Map by WebDataRocks (@webdatarocks) on CodePen.

But first things first: what is a choropleth map?

Choropleth map

Choropleth map is a data visualization technique that allows representing the data using different colors or shades of one color for different regions. Most often, it’s used to visualize how the variable varies across a certain geographic area. You can use this technique to communicate the correlation between the variable and a geographic location.

One of the best implementations of this data visualization method is a geo chart by Google Charts. Plus, it can be perfectly combined with another data visualization type – a pivot table.

Now let’s figure out how to create a dashboard in five simple steps.

Step 1: Add a web reporting tool

The first step is to include the pivot table on the page. For this, we should follow the straightforward steps from the Quickstart guide.

Step 2: Connect your data

Choose the data format you prefer and load the file into the pivot table by specifying its URL or the name of the function that returns it.

Here’s how you can specify the data source in the report object:

filename: "URL-to-your-CSV-or-JSON-file"

data: getData()

Step 3: Create a tabular report

Now it’s time to select the fields to be displayed on the grid. Let’s put the “Country” hierarchy to the rows, “Category” to the columns and aggregate this data by “Revenue” – a calculated value built using “Price” and “Quantity” measures:

"slice": {
    "rows": [{
        "uniqueName": "Country",
        "sort": "asc"
    }],
    "columns": [{
        "uniqueName": "Category",
        "sort": "asc"
    }, {
        "uniqueName": "Measures"
    }],
    "measures": [{
        "uniqueName": "Revenue",
        "formula": "sum(\"Price\") * sum(\"Quantity\") ",
        "individual": true,
        "caption": "Revenue"
    }]
}

Step 4: Integrate with Google Charts

Add the Google Charts loader to the <head> section of your web page:

<script src="https://www.gstatic.com/charts/loader.js"></script>

To have access to the data preprocessing methods of WebDataRocks, include its connector for Google Charts:

<script src="https://cdn.webdatarocks.com/latest/webdatarocks.googlecharts.js"></script>

Create a <div> container to hold the chart:

<div id="googlechart-container"></div>

Step 5: Connect the chart to the pivot table

Now that we’ve set up the web reporting tool and charts, let’s synchronize them.

For this, we need a reportcomplete event. It’s triggered once the report has completed loading into the pivot tool.

Here’s how we can attach an event handler to it:

reportcomplete: function() {
    pivot.off("reportcomplete");
}

Additionally, we need two flag variables to track when both charts loader and the report are ready to be used:

var pivotTableReportComplete = false;
var googleChartsLoaded = false;

For loading the charts, we need to specify the mapsApiKey parameter:

google.charts.load('current', {
    'packages': ['geochart'],
    'mapsApiKey': 'AIzaSyD-9tSrke72PouQMnMX-a7eZSW0jkFMBWY'
});

We also need to set the callback function for the google.charts module to track if it’s finished loading:

google.charts.setOnLoadCallback(onGoogleChartsLoaded);

Once we’ve configured everything, let’s move on to a more creative part of the tutorial – drawing charts.

Create the functions that are responsible for handling the drawing logic:

function createGoogleChart() {
    if (googleChartsLoaded) {
        pivot.googlecharts.getData({
                type: "bar"
            },
            drawChart,
            drawChart
        );
    }
}

function onGoogleChartsLoaded() {
    googleChartsLoaded = true;
    if (pivotTableReportComplete) {
        createGoogleChart();
    }
}

function drawChart(data) {
    var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable(_data.data);
    var options = {
        colorAxis: {
            colors: ['#449544', '#4ca64c', '#7fbf7f', '#b2d8b2']
        },
        backgroundColor: '#b3e5fc',
        datalessRegionColor: '#ffffff',
        defaultColor: '#f5f5f5',
    };

    var chart = new google.visualization.GeoChart(document.getElementById('googlechart-container'));
    chart.draw(data, options);

Since for mapping data, we’ll use a single-hue progression, in the colorsproperty, we should specify the palette – all the shades of the chosen color, from the lightest to the darkest. The darkest hue represents the largest values of the data, the lightest – the smallest values.

So, after we’ve defined all the needed functions, here’s how our event handler for reportcomplete looks like:

reportcomplete: function() {
    pivot.off("reportcomplete");
    pivotTableReportComplete = true;
    createGoogleChart();
}

Results

Hooray! Now your dashboard is rendered on the web page and we can use it for deriving insights from the geographic data.

The greatest thing about such a data visualization approach is that the elements on the dashboards are connected – the chart reacts to the changes applied to the report. Try filtering the data or moving the hierarchies between rows and columns to see the synchronization in action.

What’s next?

Eager to discover more features of WebDataRocks Pivot? Check out our tutorials on integration and the UI guide.

Want to customize the charts further? The editable examples from the Google Charts documentation will help you to find out how to do it.

How to choose the needed tech stack for web application development

Let’s outline the essential aspects every developer needs to know about a technology stack and how its selection can affect the entire process of software development. Further, we’ll stress the top things you should pay attention to when choosing the tech stack for your project.

We do hope that this article will help you get a full picture of the tech stack’s purpose and understand how to make a smart choice of the one that fits your project at best.

Let’s start!

What is a tech stack in software development?

Even if you are already well-familiar with the concept, let’s recap its definition.

A tech stack (also known as a solutions stack) is a bundle of tools, namely programming languages, libraries, frameworks, and databases that come together for the development of a particular web, mobile, or hybrid application.

Such a name is given to this concept not without a reason – each subsequent layer of the stack builds on top of the features of one underneath it. All of them are brought together around one common goal – to assist in building, testing and running your application.

Though this concept can be found in many areas, the term itself emerged in the software development community. It meant to simplify communication between developers and help to indicate the application’s strong and weak points.

Structure of a tech stack

Every tech stack is different, yet, they all share a common structure. It’s comprised of two major components – front end and back end. The front end is responsible for the client-side part of your app while the back end is in charge of its server-side functionality.

What is a back end stack?

A back end is the backbone of your application. It refers to everything that is not visible to users but ensures the proper functioning of the app. Behind the scenes, it takes care of things like security, content management and the structure of your app.

Structurally, the back end consists of the following components:

Programming languages (JavaScript, Node.js, Ruby, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, Go, Scala, Elixir, etc)
Server-side web frameworks (e.g., .NET, Django, Flask, Mojolicious, Laravel, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Phoenix, Express JS, AdonisJS, Spring Boot, etc)
Databases (MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, GraphQL, etc)
Web servers (Nginx, Express, Apache, Apache Tomcat, IIS, Google Web Server, etc)

Let’s break down the purposes of all the back end’s building blocks. A back-end developer has to work with programming languages that databases understand to ensure the communication between web services, database systems and the application itself. A framework simplifies and speeds up development. A database is used for storing your application’s data. In addition to a database, a caching system is required to be set up to reduce the load on your database (e.g., Memcached, Redis, etc). A web server handles requests that come from the client-side, i.e., your app’s users.

What is a front end stack?

And now let’s look at the front-end more closely.

A front end is responsible for a visual part of an application. It defines what your users see and how they can interact with your app. The core purpose of front-end web development is to create a seamless user experience and maximize its quality by making the interface accessible to any user.

As a rule, a front end is a part of the project where the development starts since it’s the most important thing to show to your customers in the first stages.

What are the cornerstones of the client-side?

HTML
CSS
JavaScript

This is a classical trio of tools for implementing designs on the web. HTML defines the structure and layout of the application’s content. CSS tells the browser how this content has to be styled with colors, fonts, etc. JavaScript is a scripting language that is responsible for making web pages interactive (i.e. defining the rules of how, when and where the content should be modified, hidden or removed). Often, front-end development becomes heavily JavaScript-oriented, especially if a web application is highly interactive.

A modern front-end developer needs to be familiar with the principles of responsive design, test-driven development, front-end frameworks and libraries (React, AngularJS, Angular, Vue, Ember, Bootstrap, Foundation), and basics of server-side rendering. Also, knowledge of the principles of working with SASS and LESS adds a competitive advantage since these pre-processors for CSS provide more flexibility and modularity when it comes to your app’s styling. Front-end developers should know how to use graphic design tools that allow building the application’s prototypes, experiment with the user interface and deliver the final variant. The most popular software is Balsamiq Mockups, Illustrator, Figma, Photoshop, Sketch. Try at least several of them to find your perfect match.

Why tech stack matters

The technology stack is a foundation of your application. The underlying technologies make a significant impact on how your app is functioning and how it will perform in the future. It also can affect the scalability of your app. That’s why developers should take the task of selection responsibly and with exceptional care.

Once you’ve chosen the tech stack, try to understand its strengths and weaknesses. This will help you to know how to benefit from the former and alleviate the latter.

How to choose your tech stack

If you struggle to make the right choice on the tech stack, there are some general guidelines for you to follow.

Take into account the size of your project – it can be small, mid-range or large. Small projects are often built on top of Node.js – React and Python-Django stacks. If you need only a simple landing page, consider using WordPress. Mid-size projects (e.g., online stores, etc) need more complex stacks such as MEAN, LAMP, or MERN that prove to perform well. Large projects require more scalability, speed, and maintainability. So, you need to find the stack that leverages well both performance and customer satisfaction.
Scalability. Depending on the technologies you choose, your app may have different scalability capabilities. This factor should be taken into consideration as early as possible. If you are building a service that will be accessed by thousands and millions of users, think about programming languages that support high-read operations and databases that are scalable. In this case, you can try MEAN stack.
Consider your app’s type. Will it be a mobile or desktop app? If a mobile, then for which platform – Android or iOS? If a desktop, which browser will it use? It’s always better to launch the MVP of your app only on a single platform – web or mobile. After you made enough process in developing and distributing your product, you can proceed to build the second app’s interface.
Stick to the mobile-first design paradigm and build a responsive web application.
Make sure you have enough engineers with the required skills.
Try to predict whether your tech stack will scale. However, the lion’s share of performance issues is related to application design rather than a choice of technologies. So, be ready to tune and optimize your app’s design.
Evaluate the cost of development. After studying carefully the tech stacks that correspond to the needs of your app. Before choosing the paid tools for development, compare the cost of a resulting stack and usability of the features it provides. Rather than investing in expensive tools or building custom ones from the ground up, try researching their free alternatives. You can reap a lot of benefits from the open-source products.

Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework that enables web developers to create UIs in an elegant and efficient manner. Lately, it started to attract more and more attention from wider circles of the web development community.

And not without a reason – among the most prominent features of Vue are a smooth learning curve, concise programming style and high performance due to the automatic tracking of the component’s dependencies during its rendering. Besides, its core concepts are well-documented.

As the Vue.js community grows in size, so does its ecosystem of development tools. Let’s explore its best representatives in more detail.

Vue CLI

Vue CLI is a standard utility for rapid Vue.JS development. It provides your Vue app with access to the build tools and ensures they work smoothly together, allowing you to fully concentrate on bringing your ideas with code rather than on configuring the app.

The flexible plugin system of Vue CLI supports Babel, TypeScript, ESLint, PostCSS, PWA, Jest, Mocha, Cypress, and Nightwatch. Plus, thanks to this system, developers can share their plugins with the community.

To my mind, the greatest thing is that you can make use of various configuration and customization options to meet your project’s specific needs.

Another thing you’ll love is a mighty GUI of Vue CLI that makes creating, configuring and managing projects a lot easier. Besides, Vue CLI has out-of-the-box support of unit & end-to-end testing.

Storybook

Storybook is an open-source environment for developing, managing and testing UI components. Seamless configuring components through a flexible API is what makes it a must-have tool for building UIs efficiently.

With Storybook, you can create awesome components and demonstrate them in an isolated environment. Since it runs outside your app, you don’t need to worry about your app’s dependencies and specific requirements.

If you want to implement extra features for Storybook, you can try addons functionality.

Vuetify

Vuetify is a component framework that offers a broad range of stunning UI components. All the components adhere to the principles of Material Design. You can use this framework for building mobile, server-side rendered, single page, and progressive web apps as well as for regular HTML pages.

To get familiar with everything Vuetify has to offer, browse the components, pick those you like the most and get hands-on experience with them in your app. Try one of the pre-made layouts, design your own theme or style your components with colors, spacings, typography and more.

Another aspect I’d like to highlight is its rich ecosystem which includes a theme generator, vuetify-loader, Cognito module, and other tools. Moreover, the components are well-documented and accompanied with nice examples.

To my mind, this framework can meet the needs of any project. Plus, you can select only specific components to be used within your app. This approach allows you to control the size of your app by making it more lightweight.

VuePress

VuePress is a static site generator tool. It offers blogging features and a plugin system. You can build custom themes and use ready-to-use community themes.

Let me break down the essence of its work. After you write the site’s content using Markdown syntax, VuePress transforms it into static HTML files. As soon as these files are loaded, your site runs as a single page application (SPA) backed by Vue, Vue Router and Webpack.

The main advantage of this approach is that you can include Vue code or components within Markdown files. That’s why the development comes out as flexible and you can create a website like a regular Vue app.

VueX

VueX is a state management system for Vue apps. You can use it as a centralized store for the application’s components and define rules that ensure that states are mutated merely in a predictable manner.

Let’s take a closer look at the structural components of VueX:

state – an object that contains the app’s state
getters – objects that provide methods used to access the state. They act like computed properties for stores.
mutations – objects that provide methods for affecting the state. Mutations may remind you of events since a mutation has a string type and a handler – a function in which we modify an actual state.
actions – objects that provide methods for triggering mutations and running async operations.

Also, it’s worth to mention modules as an inevitable part of VueX. Modules may come in handy when your application starts to scale. It’s a good practice to organize your code in modules to separate the store into individual pieces and hence simplify its maintenance. Each module has its own state, mutations, actions, and getters.

Other cool built-in features you may like are hot-reloading mutations, modules, actions, and getters during development.

To my mind, VueX perfectly copes with shared state management. But if your application is as simple as single page application, then you most likely don’t need Vuex. You should use it if you are building a medium- or large-scale single page application and facing the problem of handling the state outside of your Vue components.

Nuxt

Nuxt is another progressive Vue-based framework for building modern web applications. Under the hood of Nuxt, there are Vue official libraries (vue, vue-router, and vuex), and web dev tools (as webpack, PostCSS, and Babel) being used.

With Nuxt, you can build all kinds of Vue applications – from static landing pages to sophisticated enterprise-ready ones. It has a modular ecosystem that enables you to easily connect REST and GraphQL endpoints.

Other built-in features include server-side rendering, automatic code-splitting, ES2015+ transpilation, powerful routing system with async data and a lot more.

To my mind, the best thing about Nuxt is that it lets you enhance the development experience by providing the functionality for making the app structured and optimized.

To get a better idea of how Nuxt.js can be used, dive into examples and explore its API.

If you want to contribute to its development, you are welcome to do it on its GitHub.

Gridsome

Gridsome is a modern framework for building fast and secure websites that can be deployed to any static web host or CDN (Netflify, Amazon S3, etc). Though it’s relatively new (released in 2018), there are already a lot of adopters and followers among Vue developers. Its creators were inspired by Gatsby.js (a site generator for React). This inspiration resulted in building a similar framework but for Vue.js.

Let me explain how it works. Gridsome generates SEO-friendly HTML files based on the data source you provide within your app. The data source can be any – Markdown, CSV, Yaml, JSON, WordPress, Drupal (any other CMS), MongoDB, Airtable, etc. After loading the content, it’s turned into a single GraphQL Data Layer that serves for centralized data management. Now you can use extract this data and use it for building and deploying your Vue application.

The use of a universal GraphQL layer for all the data sources connected to the app is what makes Gridsome so unique. Due to it, data management is greatly simplified since the GraphQL layer acts as centralized storage and can be used by any page or component.

Another aspect I’d like to mention is a plugin ecosystem of Gridsome. You can take advantage of diverse plugins developed by the community of developers or even create your custom one.

Other out-of-the-box features are automatic code-splitting, static file generation, dynamic and file-based routing, hot-reloading, etc. I recommend taking the time exploring all other features of the framework.

Besides, not only it’s free but also open-source. Any contribution to the project is more than welcome since it’s a young project created and maintained by two Vue enthusiasts.

Learn more

If you are searching for ways to improve your VueJS coding skills and deepen knowledge in its specific concepts, we recommend you to explore GitConnected – there you can find plenty of tutorials on how to build apps with VueJS.

The best way to succeed in the field of data science or data analytics is to complete structured courses designed by industry experts.

And here is why.

The primary value of such courses is that you learn the subject in a logically organized way.

But courses shouldn’t stand alone. When coupled with real-life projects, they help you to get a deeper knowledge of how everything works.

Another advantage of such courses is that you can learn everything at your own pace and from anywhere in the world. Modern courses allow you to be truly flexible. There is no room for “no-time” excuses – you are free to make a learning schedule that suits you the best. No less important is interaction with the community of peers who are in the same boat as you are. By getting into thematic discussions on forums, you can move forward noticeably faster.

To simplify your way to developing an intuition behind algorithmic techniques, statistical and mathematical concepts, and master programming skills, we’ve picked for you the best-in-class free data analytics and data science online courses that deliver the most current knowledge and cover cutting edge models and techniques. During the completion, you’ll be given a chance to gain hands-on experience with coding assignments and solve real-world business problems.

Let’s dive in!

Data Science Courses

Data Science fundamentals by IBM
Probability and Statistics in Data Science using Python by UC San Diego
Essential Math for Machine Learning: Python Edi t ion by Microsoft
Statistical Thinking for Data Science and Analytics by the Columbia University
Data Science Math Skills by the Duke University

Data Science and Analysis Learning paths

Another way to start data science and analytics journeys is with tracks on DataQuest.io. There are a lot of awesome career paths available:

DataCamp also has to offer comprehensive career tracks in data science and analytics. Check them out:

During all these missions, you’ll face exciting challenges as well as get the intuition behind the basic concepts, apply statistical and ML models to real-world scenarios, and master programming in Python or R.

Data Science Specializations

Since many courses simply bombard you with the theory, we’ve selected only those that contain practical coding exercises and help to build a solid foundation of maths and statistics behind data science and analytics. All of them are created by professional data scientists who are eager to share their knowledge and simply teach you complex concepts.

We do hope you’ll find the best fit for you, get enough soft and hard skills and create a stunning portfolio to kickstart your career.

We hope you’ve had enough time to get acquainted with WebDataRocks Pivot Table and make sure its functionality is the best fit for your analytical app.

Here at WebDataRocks, we strive to provide you with the quintessential features for data visualization and analytical reporting:

Connecting to local or remote CSV and JSON data sources
17 aggregation functions for data summarization
Filtering by members, values
Report filters
Sorting
Customization options
Exporting and saving results in different formats
Extensive JavaScript API
Conditional & number formatting

All these features work together to help you compose interactive reports and understand your data better.

What if you need more data to load?

You may have noticed that WebDataRocks perfectly works with data sets that do not exceed 1 MB. This quality satisfies most of the pivot’s users.

But what if your business starts rapidly scaling?

That particular moment can be hard to predict but it’s important to be prepared for any sudden changes in advance. Especially if your data also starts growing in size and the need to find scalable solutions for data analysis arises.

That’s exactly the case for which we’ve decided to prepare you. To handle either rapid or expected growth of your business successfully, we suggest migrating from WebDataRocks to Flexmonster – a more sophisticated and flexible reporting tool.

If you are ready to discover more exciting features of Flexmonster Pivot which your project will certainly reap the benefits of, move ahead!

1. Beyond CSV and JSON: working with other data sources

Surely, CSV and JSON are the most common data sources when it comes to storing the data. And WebDataRocks perfectly copes with its processing.

But if you prefer to load the data directly from the database, you can try connecting to relational or NoSQL databases from Flexmonster Pivot.

Or if your data comes from an OLAP cube, you can connect to Pentaho Mondrian or Microsoft Analysis Services and start pivoting your data in minutes.

Lastly, if you prefer Elasticsearch to any other data storages, that’s not a problem at all likewise. You can easily connect to the index from the pivot table just as fast.

As you can see, Flexmonster provides a lot more data source options to which you can connect.

What else deserves special attention is the special algorithm under the hood of Flexmonster which ensures the data from the cube or index is loaded piece-by-piece, meaning the component loads only the data that is specified by the current slice.

This approach guarantees that all the data calculations are performed on the server-side and less data is loaded into the browser thereby improving the overall performance of your app.

2. More flexibility of integration

The developers can experience more flexibility in terms of integration with the most popular tech stacks. Among the solutions stacks in which Flexmonster proved to work smoothly are LAMP and MEAN.

As for front-end frameworks, libraries, module loaders, bundlers, and languages, you can integrate the reporting tool with AngularJS, Angular, React, webpack, RequireJS, TypeScript, ASP.NET, PhoneGap, and a lot more.

Check out the full list of client-side technologies for which Flexmonster provides ready-to-use wrappers and integration instructions.

3. Extended filters

You may especially like more sophisticated filtering options of Flexmonster Pivot.

As in WebDataRocks, you can easily manage how and when filters are applied to your data but using more versatile queries.

Take advantage of filters by date – we are sure that your end-users may find these extremely powerful for their reports.

4. Total alignment with Material Design

What is distinctive about Flexmonster is its UI design inspired by the principles of Material Design. It makes the component totally suitable for any app, no matter where it’s published – on Android, iOS or web.

5. More customization options

As well as in WebDataRocks, you can customize the Toolbar, apply predefined themes, localize UI labels, customize cells, and configure exporting options of Flexmonster.

However, you can feel even more freedom of personalization and change the component in line with the needs of your project. For example, you can completely change the context menu to add custom scenarios for the right-click action, enable search in the Field List, and a lot more. There are also more date and time formatting options available.

If you want to dive into other visual customization options, refer to the Customizing appearance section.

6. Pivot Charts

This is the feature exclusive to Flexmonster. In addition to integrations with charting libraries, you can benefit from Pivot Charts that are always at hand.

To understand patterns hiding in your data visually, simply send summarized numbers to Pivot Charts in a few clicks:

You can even try the split view to look at both charts and the grid at the same time.

7. Extended API

The JavaScript API of Flexmonster offers many more API calls. For example, you can partially update data in the runtime, define custom sorting for hierarchy members, and more.

8. Advanced customer support

If you choose Flexmonster, you’ll also get new minor features and updates every two weeks. Besides, the Flexmonster Support team is always ready to help you to manage a case of any difficulty on the Forum.

Discover Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts

Feeling you need more data to analyze? Then you should give Flexmonster a try. Learn more in our documentation.

You have 30 days to test its functionality without any commitment and decide whether to move to a new solution or not. Oh, besides, it’s really easy. We’ve prepared a special guide for you to make the transitioning completely seamless.

You may also be interested in:

Today we’re going to talk about analytics. To be more precise – HR analytics.

We’ll clarify why it is so important for small-, medium- and large-sized businesses and how you can implement a custom solution for HR data analysis simply using charts and a pivot table without investing a lot of developer resources?

You might be wondering: why does your company need to focus on it at all? – Fortunately, we have all the answers for you here.

First of all, it helps to evaluate the performance of the company’s departments and answer crucial questions regarding the work of employees.

Though often being underestimated, HR analytics also gives the power to transform how the HR department performs by testing the effectiveness of the implemented strategies.

In other words, provided that you use analytics to the fullest extent, you can improve employee performance, get a bird’s eye view of your business and make data-driven decisions relying on extracted insights rather than simple intuition.

Before the start, we suppose you’ve already managed to outline your business goals. The goals may vary from company to company but the foremost ones may include:

recognizing trends in the current workforce.
increasing employee retention rates, engagement, and performance.
predicting voluntary and involuntary turnover.

Then, you need to identify metrics to track.

We took care of it and have prepared a kind of memo for you.

It’s fundamental metrics we’re going to analyze in this tutorial and corresponding types of visualization. (!But bear in mind that you can always calculate your own metrics with the help of tools we’ll mention below).

Employee productivity (efficiency). This is the ratio of the employee output’s amount to time spent on a particular task or project.
Turnover rate. Measures the number of employees leaving a company over time. With the multi-line chart, we can track a turnover rate in each department. This metric is often the center of the HR manager’s attention. The goal is to minimize this number.
Revenue per employee. Measures the revenue per employee.
Retention rate. This is the opposite of a turnover rate. Measures the percentage of employees remained at the end of a period. We can also measure it by the department.
Employee engagement. Measures the level of the employee’s commitment. It is mostly affected by satisfaction and stress levels. We can use the line chart to track engagement for each person over months. Or within each department.
Training costs per employee. Column chart.
Overtime hours by departments and age groups. Best to analyze with a column chart.
The number of part-time employees in the company.
Hires to the goal. Total hires required to achieve the specified recruitment goal within a fixed time.
Absenteeism (absence rate). Measures the percentage of total working time when employees are absent from work. You want it to be as low as possible.
Ranges of salaries by departments.

And finally, demographics-related metrics:

Employees’ countries of origin. We can display the top countries in a pie chart.
Gender ratio. The ratio between the number of females and males in the company. Pie chart works here best since there are only two categories to depict.
Age groups. Column chart.

Now, check all your data that you’ve already collected from various sources and start building your HR analytics solution.

We suggest the most popular way to communicate all the data through an interactive dashboard. You can easily implement this approach by combining WebDataRocks Pivot with Highcharts.

Both libraries work together like a charm and soon you’ll make sure of it. Let’s go-ahead to the dashboard’s creating!

Step 1: Add Highcharts dependencies

We’ll be adding all scripts into the <head> section of the web page to ensure they are run before the rest of the page is loaded.

To access Highcharts, include these scripts:

<script src="https://code.highcharts.com/highcharts.js"></script>
<script src="https://code.highcharts.com/highcharts-more.js"></script>

Let’s also add the export module to allow end-users to download charts as PDF, JPG, PNG, or SVG images:

<script src="http://code.highcharts.com/modules/exporting.js"></script>

If you want to enable exporting without an internet connection, you can add this script instead:

<script src="http://code.highcharts.com/modules/offline-exporting.js"></script>

Add containers where the charts will be rendered:

<div id="piechart-container"></div>
...
<div id="barchart-container"></div>

Create as many containers as there will be charts on the dashboard.

Step 2: Add WebDataRocks Pivot

It’s time to configure a reporting tool in your project.

Include WebDataRocks scripts and styles:

<link href="https://cdn.webdatarocks.com/latest/webdatarocks.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="https://cdn.webdatarocks.com/latest/webdatarocks.toolbar.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdn.webdatarocks.com/latest/webdatarocks.js"></script>

To apply the dark theme, add the corresponding styles:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://cdn.webdatarocks.com/latest/theme/dark/webdatarocks.min.css" />

Create the container for the pivot table:

<div id="pivot-container"></div>

Step 3: Initialize the pivot table on the page

var pivot = new WebDataRocks({
    container: "#pivot-container",
    toolbar: true,
    report: {
        dataSource: {
            data: getData()
        }
    }
});

To load data into the component, define and set a function that returns the JSON data:

function getData() {
    return [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "Full Name": "Sallyanne Tryhorn",
            "Job Title": "Software Consultant",
            "Country": "Sweden",
            "Gender": "F",
            "Employee Engagement": 0.8,
            "Part-time": "No",
            "Revenue per employee": 889,
            "Hours Spent for Project": 66,
            "University": "Kalmar University College",
            "Currency": "SEK",
            "Department": "Business Development",
            "LinkedIn Skill": "Brand Management",
            "Month Salary": 1229,
            "Overtime Hours": 12,
            "Employment start date": "9/26/2015",
            "Age Group": "<21"
        }
    ]
}

Don’t forget to specify data types for JSON!

Step 4: Create a report

Now that your pivot contains the data, it's time to analyze it.

To provide your end-users with a meaningful report, set a slice that describes which hierarchies have to be placed to the rows, columns, and measures.

As well as a report, this object has a JSON structure:

"slice": {
    "rows": [{
        "uniqueName": "Department"
    }],
    "columns": [{
        "uniqueName": "Measures"
    }],
    "measures": [{
        "uniqueName": "Total Overtime Hours",
        "formula": "sum(\"Overtime Hours\") ",
        "caption": "Total Overtime Hours"
    }],
    "sorting": {
        "column": {
            "type": "desc",
            "tuple": [],
            "measure": "Total Overtime Hours"
        }
    }
}

This slice helps to get an understanding of the overtime hours by departments.

Try exploring the data interactively - drag and drop the hierarchies on the grid and save the resulting report.

Step 5: Pass the data to the charts

Before creating the charts and filling them with the data, we need to process the data to the appropriate formats.

Each chart requires a different data structure. To save your time, add the WebDataRocks connector for Highcharts to get access to the ready-to-use methods that handle data processing:

<script src="https://cdn.webdatarocks.com/latest/webdatarocks.highcharts.js"></script>

Next, we need to write code that performs the following scenario for each chart type:

Gets the data from the pivot table component. On this step, you can specify which subset of the data you want to visualize.
Processes this data with the help of the connector's methods.
Creates the chart and sends the data to it.
Each time the report on the grid is updated, the renewed data has to be resent to the chart.

To know whether the pivot table is ready to provide the data, we should use an event handler for reportcomplete.

Here's a simple example of the handler you can attach to the event:

reportcomplete: function() {
    pivot.off("reportcomplete");
    createPieChart();
    createBarChart();
}

To keep the blog post concise, I prefer not to include all the code here - you can find all the details of charts creating in the CodePen demo. You can also see there how to apply a dark theme for Highcharts.

Step 6: Enjoy the resulting dashboard

See how the dashboard looks like as a result:

This dashboard is completely ready to be an efficient instrument for HR analytics. Your end-users can interact both with a pivot table and charts, change reports on the fly and look at the data from multiple angles.

Coupled together, the pivot table and charts complement each other and make your data speak.

Hopefully, the presented approach will help you to get insights from the data, showcase your data story to the colleagues and improve the business performance in the long run.

Move up

Developer’s choice: an overview of the best front-end frameworks in 2020

React

Vue

Angular

Comparing popularity

Backbone

Ember

Comparing popularity

Which frameworks are the fastest?

Final words

Further reading

Prettify the data

Create a report

Format values

Highlight values

Check results

Play with code?

About WebDataRocks

MEAN

MERN

MEVN

LAMP

RoR (Ruby on Rails)

Empower your tech stack with analytics

Choropleth map

Step 1: Add a web reporting tool

Step 2: Connect your data

Step 3: Create a tabular report

Step 4: Integrate with Google Charts

Step 5: Connect the chart to the pivot table

Results

What’s next?

What is a tech stack in software development?

Structure of a tech stack

What is a back end stack?

What is a front end stack?

Why tech stack matters

How to choose your tech stack

Vue CLI

Storybook

Vuetify

VuePress

VueX

Nuxt

Gridsome

Learn more

Data Science Courses

Data Science and Analysis Learning paths

Data Science Specializations

1. Beyond CSV and JSON: working with other data sources

2. More flexibility of integration

3. Extended filters

4. Total alignment with Material Design

5. More customization options

6. Pivot Charts

7. Extended API

8. Advanced customer support

Discover Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts

Step 1: Add Highcharts dependencies

Step 2: Add WebDataRocks Pivot

Step 3: Initialize the pivot table on the page

Step 4: Create a report

Step 5: Pass the data to the charts

Step 6: Enjoy the resulting dashboard