A Comparative Analysis of ANGULAR 6 versus REACT 16.3 Angular 6 and React 16.3 are two of the most well-known JavaScript frameworks in the software development universe. The next question that usually comes – React development or Angular development for your next app? Both of the frameworks share the same concepts that make building powerful and scalable web apps possible. Well, when it finally comes to choosing, the only question you should be searching the answer to is ‘What exactly you’re looking to get?’ while developing your app. With both Angular and React you can achieve equally good results, so it’s more not about what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. So, the tip #1 is to actually determine your needs and then match it with framework capabilities. To get you better prepared for testing, we have decided to take a closer look and get into some differences between React and Angular to identify all pros and cons for both.

ANGULAR

Angular is a complete framework either for web or mobile with everything you need for building scalable applications available out of the box. It is built and maintained by a Google’s team, as well as by multiple developers’ communities, and it is licensed under the MIT license. Angular Adoption Angular has been widely recognized as framework with a steep learning curve. There’re a few core reasons for it, which are the abundance of requirements and recommendations to the architecture and design of applications and components, as well as the use of TypeScript as the main language. Although many developers find it difficult to get started with Angular, there’re number of reasons indicating that it is worth learning it once to start getting all the benefits onwards. Angular 6 Key features Angular has a number of features that can be considered as advantages of the framework, as well as its drawbacks. It is built with Typescript, which can be great or neutral depending on who you ask. It gives a type safety and it’s own unique features in advance, before they land in all browsers, as well as optimize their code for the browser. It also allows developers to specify data types and strict contracts between multiple pieces of code. Those who come from a Java or C# background might like Typescript as it shares a lot of features. One of the greatest benefits of the Typescript in the compilation process is that we can catch a lot of errors in the code before starting your app. Angular 6 Pros / Cons So, let us summarize all pros and cons that we see in Angular framework. Pros: TypeScript helps to identify value type errors at an early stage; it also may help you to understand what data structures work better.

Zone.js provides additional control over the execution context function, as well as solves the problem of loss of context.

RxJS is a powerful tool for working with data streams integrated into Angular.

Angular has a high degree of modularity, which allows you to connect to the application only the necessary parts.

The building process has multiple optimization stages, which eventually positively affects the size of the final files.

Solid ecosystem of plug-ins, add-ons and dev tools. Cons: Sometimes redundant error checking with TypeScript makes you spend extra time on type declarations; there is also a chance of encountering problems when using external libraries with missing declarations.

Zone.js – wraps its methods to a lot of global features and methods, which affects the integration capabilities.

Angular CLI is a little behind the Angular capabilities and some features remain unavailable when using this CLI tool to scaffold a project.

REACT

React is a low level JavaScript framework developed and maintained by Facebook for building modern user interfaces; MIT Licensed. It is being used to streamline development process and quickly build powerful and scalable web and mobile apps. Among React users there are quite a few companies that you might recognize, such as Twitter, Airbnb, Uber or Pinterest, besides the popular Facebook’ products. React 16.3 Adoption Comparing to Angular, React’s learning curve should be significantly lower. Except a JSX which is hard to get used to, there’re not as much specific syntax to remember, so it’s easy to get started with React. However, most developers indicate that shifting from other environments like PHP, .NET, and Django, would require a certain mindset for problem solving with React. React 16.3 Key features One of React’s biggest selling points is that it uses a lightweight representation of the real DOM (Virtual DOM), which provides a more efficient way to update the view in a web application. Another good thing about React is its focus on the application state. It’s the object that determines how the component renders and behaves. Because React focuses on these two features – Virtual DOM and state, some missing pieces like routing or global app state need to be filled in. Luckily, there are a lot of React libraries to solve these issues, such as React Router and Redux. React 16.3 Pros / Cons Just like Angular, React also has its up- and downsides. Pros: First and foremost, once again, it’s worth mentioning that this framework is easier to learn, which allows new people joining the project to get started pretty quickly.

Reusable components ensure both development speed and consistency.

Virtual DOM simplifies rendering on the client and tracking the lifecycle of components. The performance of web applications with Virtual DOM is much higher than working with the DOM manually.

Unidirectional data flow chosen by React, ensure clean state management in your app.

The open-source libraries comprising React are being constantly developed and updated by the largest community of front-end open-source developers.

JSX is an HTML analogue with a full power of JavaScript

React provides better solutions for server side rendering single page applications, which is crucial for SEO performance

Functional stateless components – best practices around components, where we keep them small and lightweight, so we can reuse them easily and really don’t care from where exactly data came. Cons: As a low-level framework, React leaves more space for custom cases and solutions at the cost of having developers to find and implement the best solutions. It doesn’t provide state out of the box. You have to pick one (React, MobX, etc) and add it to your application.

A big number of npm dependencies can be challenging for some developers.

React is closer to the functional programming paradigm in JavaScript, which may cause difficulties for developers that come from classical language background.

It may be said that React trades boilerplate code for expressiveness, i.e. it is prefered to make developers write more code than hiding important parts of an app under unclear API.

CONCLUSION – Angular 6 or React 16.3?