Javascript frameworks are self-explanatory. As ubiquitous as JS is on the Internet—one of the key technologies that make up the web, alongside CSS and HTML—it comes with a slew of issues if coding best practices aren’t followed. This is where frameworks come into play.
Frameworks not only give an easy answer to common programming challenges, but they also make writing easier for big teams due to their proclivity towards standardization. While each framework has its own set of unique difficulties to overcome, they make developers’ lives easier by conserving resources in the long run.
However, there is a fascinating trend in modern front-end frameworks: their claim to be ‘blazing fast.’ JS code is known for increasing website loading time, decreasing user time-to-interaction, raising bounce rate, and causing an overall degradation in user experience. These new frameworks are not only optimized for performance from the bottom up, but also provide a slew of novel solutions for getting past the anachronisms of utilizing JS to create feature-rich, easy-to-use, and maintenance-free websites.
In this post, we’ll look at several innovative techniques used in contemporary front-end JS frameworks to enhance loading speeds, user experience, and make web development easier for everyone.
Qwik provides a lazy-loading method.
Misko Hevery, the author of Angular, created Qwik as a framework built on top of JSX. It eliminates sluggish loading times by being a completely lazy-loadable system. Lazy loading is a loading technique that postpones the initialization of resources until they are really required to be shown. This saves a lot of resources on both the client and server sides and significantly improves loading speed.
Furthermore, Qwik has an optimizer that divides an application into several tiny, lazy-loading portions. It also included the ‘Partytown’ library, which delegated third-party scripts to a worker thread rather than processing them through the main thread.
Qwik also has no hydration delay because it is resumable. This implies that when the application is displayed, it may serialize the program’s state into HTML, allowing it to restart operation without utilizing JavaScript until the user interacts with the web application.
Remix makes use of server-side rendering.
Remix is a recently open-sourced React framework that is a full-stack web framework with an emphasis on user interface. It also specializes in server-side rendering. The ability to nest pages is one of the most crucial characteristics that distinguishes Remix from its competitors. Remix uses this capability to load all data on the server side in parallel and transmit a fully formed HTML page to the client side, resulting in an extraordinarily quick load time.
In addition, the framework pre-fetches everything in parallel before the user ever clicks on a link, resulting in a shorter time to engagement. Because of the method Remix provides the website, it does not need to be reloaded in the event of a mistake. Error management is embedded into the framework on both the server and client sides.
Astro uses Islands to optimize loading
Astro is a frontend architecture that supports React, Vue, and Svelte. It also offers a developing developer ecosystem with a wide range of connectors and themes that can be added to a project.
The ‘Astro Islands’ are Astro’s most distinctive feature. Astro Islands are interactive user interface components that are housed within a static page. Each island renders independently, and each one may be made up of a different UI framework that Astro supports.
Astro ensures fast site loading by producing each page in HTML ahead of time, a technique known as selective hydration.’ Even components created using well-known JS frameworks will be translated to HTML, ensuring that the website renders with no client-side JavaScript. Astro loads the essential JavaScript code for a particular component only when an interactive component is required to be loaded, making overall load times sluggish.
Next.js combines static pages and SSR
Next.js is a React framework that promises to offer full-stack development capability to the frontend. The ‘automatic static optimisation’ function of Next.js blurs the distinctions between static and dynamic components in a webpage.
This implies that Next.js developers may create hybrid apps that include both static sites and server-side rendered pages, because static pages are nevertheless reactive owing to client-side hydration. The framework also includes a plethora of essential features such as rapid route adjustments, dynamic API routing, universal flexibility, and the opportunity to customize the frontend in any way you see fit.
Deno.js optimized for performance by utilizing Rust
Deno is a piece of software developed by Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. Dahl created ‘Deno,’ a Javascript runtime that leverages V8 and is built on Rust, after expressing his reservations about the manner he constructed Node.js. Deno, being built on one of the fastest compiled languages, not only works quicker than Node, but also more securely.
A linter, IDE integration, a test runner, and fine-grained permission checks are also included in the runtime. It also claims to be the “fastest JavaScript web server ever constructed” and has best-in-class HTTP server performance.
When will developers be able to use a genuinely lightning-fast framework?
As we can see from the latest crop of front-end JS frameworks, each one takes a unique approach to loading speed. Developers can utilize any of the new-age frameworks to tackle a specific challenge, depending on the use-case of the product.
A frequent adage in the world of software engineering is that not every problem is solved. Engineers must instead explore innovative methods to modify the problem so that it can be solved. This strategy may be used to solve the challenge of creating a one-size-fits-all, lightning-fast JS framework. Instead, developers may select any of these equally viable choices and tackle the problem with a different set of tools.
However, one tendency that can be found in all new-age front-end JS frameworks is a reduction in the amount of JavaScript performed on the client side. Loading JS only when needed is one of the simplest methods to reduce slowness on websites and improve the user experience.
‘WebAssembly’ is another technology that has the potential to produce a paradigm change in web development. WebAssembly offers far-reaching ramifications for the web as a whole, as well as the ability to execute various languages on the client side at near native performance. While it is designed to operate with JavaScript, it also supports languages such as C++ and Rust. Because they are compiled languages, they can enable developers to create client-side apps that operate at speeds that JavaScript just cannot.
JS frameworks may be a band-aid solution until WebAssembly evolves and becomes the mainstream, but lightning-fast frameworks appear to be at the bleeding edge of JavaScript for web development, discovering novel methods to solve for speed while retaining the status quo.