In this blog, I am going to explain some of major differences between two famous front-end framework i.e Vue.js and Angular. We will also try to find which one is better, Vue.js or Angular for web development.

Points to discuss:

• Introduction
• Steps to setup using Command Line Interface (CLI).
• Directory structure.
• Similarities
• Complexities
• Performance
• Popularity
• Flexibility
• Backward compatibility.
• Learning curve.
• Ease of Usage.

Introduction:

Angular is one of the most popular javascript framework for creating web applications which is developed and maintained by Google.

Angular have four major version released as follows:

• Angular 1 (AngularJS)
• Angular 2
• Angular 4
• Angular 5 (Latest)

Angular 1, which is also known as AngularJS was first version for this technology. Angular 1 was followed by Angular 2, which was launched with tons of changes when compared to its predecessor Angular 1.

Angular 4, which was released on March 23, 2017, is a lot similar to Angular 2. It comes with a “backward compatibility” feature which allows easy interaction between Angular 4 and Angular 2. Similarly projects developed on Angular 2 will work seamlessly with Angular 4. Although Angular 4 works on the same structure as Angular 2 but it is much faster as compared to Angular 2. Angular 4 uses TypeScript 2.1 version whereas Angular 2 uses TypeScript version 1.8. This brings a lot of difference in performance.

AngularJS is based on the model view controller, whereas Angular 2/4/5 are based on components structure.

VueJS is an open source javaScript framework used to develop interactive web applications. It is one of the most famous framework used for simplified web development. VueJS focuses on ‘view layer’. It can be easily integrated into big projects for front-end development without much hassle or changes. The installation for VueJS is very easy to start with. Any developer, beginner or professional can easily understand and build interactive web interfaces in no time. VueJS was created by Evan You, an ex-employee from Google. The first version of VueJS was released in Feb 2014. It recently clocked 64,828 stars on GitHub, making it one of the most popular framework out there.

Installation and Setup:

Angular 4 project can be setup by using angular-CLI which is easy to install. To get started with the installation, we first need to make sure that we have latest version NodeJS and npm installed in system. If NodeJS is already installed, you can check the version of NodeJS in terminal using the command ‘node –v’.

Similarly to check the version of npm, type command ‘npm –v’ in the terminal which will display the version of npm.

Now that we have NodeJS and npm installed, let us run the angular CLI commands to install Angular 4.


npm install -g @angular/cli  //command to install angular 4
ng new <project-name>  // name of the project
Cd <project-name>
ng serve //This command builds the application and starts the web server on port 4200.


VueJS

There are many ways to install VueJS like:

• Using CDN.
• Using NPM
• Using CLI Command Line.

But,here I am going to explain the installation through CLI. we first need to make sure we have nodejs and npm installed with the latest version.once it is installed run the command,

npm install --global vue-cli // To install vue cli
vue init webpack <project-name>
cd <project-name>
npm install
npm run dev //This command starts the web server on port 8080


Directory Structure:

Similarities:

VueJS has lot of similarities with Angular. Directives such as ‘v-if’, ‘v-for’ are almost similar to ‘ngIf’, ‘ngFor’ of Angular. They both have a command line interface for project installation and to build. VueJS uses Vue-CLI and Angular uses Angular-CLI. Both offer two-way data binding, server side rendering, etc.

Complexity:

VueJS is easy to learn and start with. A beginner can take CDN library of VueJS and get started in jsfiddle. For Angular, we need to go through a series of steps for installation and its little difficult for beginners to get started with. It uses TypeScript for coding which is difficult for people having core JavaScript background. However, it is easier for users belonging to Java and C# background.

Performance:

Your applications need to have a fast initial loading time i.e. small bundle size, as well as great runtime performance in order to perform well.

Angular is slower than Vue.JS and it has a big bundle size when it comes to smaller apps. However, Angular is a faster framework with great runtime performance when it comes to complex and larger apps.

The performance of Vue.JS might change when it comes to bigger apps focused on specific tasks. Therefore, the performance results need to be put into perspective and hence there is no clear winner in this dimension.

This is because size and type of application significantly impacts performance of a framework.

Popularity:

At present, Angular is more popular than VueJS as most of organizations use Angular, making it very popular. Job opportunities are also more for candidates experienced in Angular. However, VueJS is taking its place in the market and can be considered as a good competitor for Angular and React.

Flexibility:

VueJS can be easily merged with any other big project without any issues whereas Angular will not be easy to start working with for any other existing project.

Backward Compatibility:

We started with AngularJS, moved to Angular 2 and now its Angular 4. AngularJS and Angular 2 are completely different. Project application developed in AngularJS cannot be converted to Angular2 because of the core differences.

The recent version of VueJS is 2.0 and it is provided with backward compatibility. Also it provides good documentation, which is very easy to understand.

Learning curve:

Angular probably has the steepest learning curve because you need to learn a new language called TypeScript barring everything that you might have used earlier in JS development such as modules or components.

However, it brings along features like dependency injection that demands a bit of hard work in order to optimize your app as well as capitalize on features like ahead-of -time compilation and lazy loading. Vue.js, on the other hand, works fine with both ES5 and ES6 and appears like JavaScript. Its template is intuitive to manipulate using components and directives and easy to output your data. However, building more complex app is more complicated but Vuex, the official library for Vue.js applications, make it much easier.

Ease of usage:

In the words of Evan You, the founder of Vue.js, unlike Angular, Vue.js is a more flexible and less opinionated solution. Thus, it allows you to structure your application the way you want it to be rather than being forced to the way of framework. It is just like an interface layer which you can use to create light features in web pages instead of creating larger single page applications. Hence, Vue.js is considered more balanced as it doesn’t put several implications like Angular and empowers you to build applications your way instead of ending up doing it the Angular way.

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