How to Choose the Best Framework

At present, if you search for which framework should I choose to learn? Then you may end up reading hundreds of blogs with different answers as there are dozens of tools, languages, and frameworks out there. But, with such a variety of options, there is a lot of confusion when it comes to which framework is best? Which framework suits you and your career or your business?

In reality, no one can tell this. You may wonder, Why? Is it such a big question? Then my answer is- Yes, as each framework proves to be a good fit for one set of challenges while not for others.

This article is written to answer all your confusions and help you land upon some good decision. Before that, you must be familiar with the framework. Check out this “What is a framework?“.

Before going to the frameworks, let’s discuss some of the aspects into consideration for choosing them.

1. Ease of Learning  and Learning Resources

This is the essential aspect. For using any framework, first, you must learn it. For that, you need some additional resources, books, courses, articles besides the lengthy and dry documentation to help you get started.

Developing an extraordinary framework and delivering the core ideas behind it are both different. A sound-crafted learning resource dramatically cuts the learning curve and leads to more innovations and development.

If you end up struggling in finding good resources, then be cautious. It might be possible that the framework is new or not well adopted by the community.

Like if you google React or Angular, then there is plenty of valuable resources are there. Besides their beautiful documentations, plenty of articles and courses by trustworthy authors and instructors are there. Unfortunately, it is not the case with Svelte. Besides the excellent documentation, we are left with few resources and video courses. Despite its unique functionalities, it is less adopted by the community yet.

It may be helpful first to decide the programming language and your career path as each programming language has its own set of frameworks. Choosing the framework of familiar languages boosts your speed and saves tons of hours in learning the framework. You can refer to this blog for more details.

Still, this option alone is not sufficient to choose the proper framework for you but filters out some of them. Let’s consider the following point also to reach your destination.

2. Popularity

The framework’s popularity implicitly notifies about its community support, feature sets, and it is battle-tested or not. Similarly, if a framework is not so popular, it might mean that there is less community support and only a few developers who mastered it.

Choosing a less popular framework will land you in some problematic situations that might be a real burden. Less popular means fewer job opportunities and fewer developers who know it. So you might be stuck up in searching for a new job or an employee who fits your specialization. It even slows down the development speed of any project as if you need more developers to accelerate the development.

Besides that, if you specialize in something popular, there will be more appealing opportunities in your career and many projects out there for you.

Github and StackOverflow are the easiest way to determine the popularity of a framework.

Popularity is also because those frameworks have existed for a very long duration to prove themselves best. But many other frameworks exist out there, which may become popular too soon. So, try to familiar with them in your spare time and try to use them in real-world projects to have tremendous opportunities in the future.

Despite the popularity, there are some other aspects which help you to move ahead to your destination.

3. Core Features

Let’s have a more profound analysis for choosing the best.

Any project or software architecture requires a certain number of features to be implemented. As each framework differs from the other in some aspects, either it is features or the implementation. For that purpose, go through the documentation and get a sense of what that framework is? Is it a full-fledged view layer only or something in between?

For comparing the core features, firstly, list out the features you are expecting from the project. Then look for the following in their documentations. For a form submitting web application, let’s take a feature set: state management, form processing, and validation, HTTP communication, and templating. Not every time your framework meets all your requirements and should need a different approach to achieve that functionality. Like, from the given analysis Angular and Svelte suit best.

So with React and Vue only represents the view layer of the application. Then all other parts, i.e., form validation, HTTP communication, etc., are up to you. And eventually, sometimes, you may end up building your custom framework.

If still you are not landed at your destination, then you may consider some more aspects.

4. Usability

This time you need to have something running so that you get a better insight into that framework. Try to implement a small project using that framework. This may help compare the actual stats of different frameworks according to your requirement.

Many questions come into mind while working on any framework. Is it productive to use this framework? How long implementation need to achieve the desired output? Is there any need for external libraries?

Ease to understand the flow of the project? Ease of testing and management of the project? Are there any tools to speed up the development? Is this framework suitable for future projects or not?

So, the best way to answer all questions is to use them in some real-world mini-project. While developing the project, you get practical insights into that framework, whether it suits best to your requirement or not.

Now, you are just one step away from your destination.

5. Ease of Integration(with Other Libraries)

To have a great application, it should be feature-rich. It is impossible to implement each feature from scratch, so you need to integrate external libraries with your application. Amazing libraries focus on specific problems, be it optimization, data manipulation, rich text editing, etc. If integrating any of the libraries degrades the application performance or needs to spend hours on it every time you use it, maybe that’s not the optimal choice. 

So, it is very important that you must check for the compatibility of other libraries with your framework.

Generally, for React and Vue, you may not run into such a problem as they are compatible with many libraries while it is not so with Angular.

So, finally you have reached your destination, and now you can finally choose the framework that suits best you and your requirements.

Choosing the right framework is one of the most crucial steps toward making your project a success. Each of the above details plays an important role in determining which framework best suits your project either working on small or large projects, performing solo, or in a team. 

6. Conclusion

Our next blog will give you insights about some of the popular frameworks in various fields like web development, mobile development , machine learning, and more. As the technology trends are evolving rapidly, the answer to the question “Which is the best framework to choose?” varies over time. So, this article gives you a general sense of which framework may work the best.