The JavaScript framework Aurelia has reached its 1.0 release, capping off 18 months of intense work amid a very turbulent time in the JavaScript community.

Aurelia has emerged as an alternative to the Angular vs. React debate. Created by Rob Eisenberg, it's goal is to provide a standards-based, modular framework with minimal boilerplate and ceremony.

Eisenberg, who was on the Angular team at one point, says that part of the reason he left is because of how Angular 2 was shaping up:

I realized that Angular 2 was not something I wanted to use, not something my community wanted to use, and probably wasn't something that much of the Angular 1 community would want to use (if they knew everyting I knew). So, I left the Angular 2 team to build a next generation platform based on adherance to web standards, designed to solve the real problems that developers face in the real world

For their part, the Aurelia team is trying to make its adoption as easy as can be. They've provided numerous ways to get started with it, including a CLI tool, Webpack skeletons, JSPM skeletons, NPM, GitHub, Bower, and basic script tags.

InfoQ caught up with Eisenberg and asked him about Aurelia and its future:

InfoQ: How do you describe Aurelia to someone who's never heard of it?

Eisenberg: Aurelia is an open source application platform. It’s sort of like Flex or Silverlight but it’s built entirely on open web technologies and is completely standards-based. You can use it to build browser apps, mobile apps and desktop apps. The platform is designed to stay out of your way, enabling great productivity, clean code and minimal vendor lock-in.

What are the project's goals?

At the highest level, our goal is to advance the open web. Specifically, we’re working on doing that by making it easier to build complex applications so that more and more developers can replace proprietary native technologies with an open, standards-based solution.

What have been some of the biggest challenges in building Aurelia?

The challenges faced in building Aurelia are pretty common to both open source and web projects. From a technical perspective, unfortunately, even in 2016, we still have to deal regularly with differences between browsers. For sure, the situation is massively improved upon from even a few years ago, but issues still remain. From a community perspective, there’s always the challenge of continuing to grow the number of contributors. A lot of developers are still intimidated or uncertain of how to contribute to open source. There are many ways to get involved: some small and some big, but all of them are important. We want to communicate that you don’t have to be a JavaScript expert to be able to contribute. In fact, there are many ways to get involved even if you know little to nothing about programming.

Where does Aurelia go from here?

Up until now our focus has been on creating a capable, stable platform for application development. With our 1.0 release, we believe we’ve done a good job of reaching these goals. However, there is much more to be done when we think about improving developer experience and continuing to advance the open web. We’ve got a number of initiatives underway right now. Some of these include simply adding new libraries such as validation and scroll virtualization. Other initiatives are centered around things like improvements to SEO and server-side rendering. We’re also working on enhanced tooling such as CLI enhancements, template analysis and editor integration.

To find out more about Aurelia, visit the homepage at aurelia.io.