as for 05.06.2017

still work in progress

main todos at the end

The influential post How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 highlighted important feature of JavaScript - a vast amount of JavaScript frameworks avaiable for developers. But feelings are not enough to describe the whole ecosystem and we need some data. Some of them were collected by the State of JavaScript Survey where we can find answers to questions on topics ranging from front-end frameworks and state management, to build tools and testing libraries. For those who are starting with web-development I would recommend to read A Study Plan To Cure JavaScript Fatigue.

My personal goal here is to analyse the most popular frameworks to highlight another troublesome feature of JavaScript. There is not only vast amount of the frameworks, but also the vast amount of versions of each framework. It is hard for the beginner to study particular framework based on the materials and courses avaiable online,

because there are becoming outdated very quickly. Even though that for most of them principles are not changing some features are appearing/disappearing often. But not only frameworks are changing. All existing JavaScript labels can give you a headache. The first encouter of ES5, ES6 and ES2016 can be frightening, and the advice that you can learn babel to resolve the problem is not helping. For those who are not familiar with them - here you have nice blog post about JavaScript versioning.

Based on github repos and npm stats I will check how often new version of each framework is released with emphasis on the major releases. Based on the the State of JavaScript Survey I will focus on the following frameworks:

• Front-End survey
  • React ✅
  • Angular ✅
  • Ember ✅
  • Vue ✅
  • Backbone ✅
• State Management survey
  • Redux ✅
  • Mobx
  • Relay
• Full- Stack survey
  • Meteor ✅
  • FeathersJS
  • DoneJS
• Build Tools survey
  • Webpack ✅
  • Grunt
  • Gulp
  • Browserify
• Node.js ✅

The analysis is done with R and presented using GitHub Pages. All codes are available on GitHub

Some part of my motivation was described in the introduction. However it lacks data. Is it JavaScript really important? How important is it?

Using Google BigQuery httparchive datasets I check the growth rate of bytes count for web content. Starting from 2012年01月01日 till 2017年04月01日 the average size of JS code for 10,000 most popular webpages grew by 200% while HTML content only by ~50%. More importantly since 2014 Html count stabilized while JS and CSS code still rises. Data show how important JS is for the web development right now. Keep in mind that those data do not show e.g. the server-side JS implementations (or other back-end code base).

bytes growth

As for now the data about following frameworks was downloaded.

Some frameworks use only numeric versioning, while other use also extended tags (e.g. rc1, rc2, etc. - see versioning).

Some data was downloaded using GitHub GraphQL api, some using webscrapping techniques. For more details see R codes.

NodeJS logo

• Ofifcial webpage
• Wikipedia
• NodeJS releases policy

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment for executing JavaScript code server-side.

Nodejs with its node repo is using number versioning, however they are releasing so often that in description you have details about each release. Maybe in the future I will extend the analysis with those details.

Last 10 releases:

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Other links:

• Node by numbers

NodeJS logo

• Ofifcial webpage
• Wikipedia

React is an open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Facebook with its react repo is using mainly number versioning. After version v0.14.8 facebook change the versioning and started with the version v15.0.0. See tables below:

Last 10 releases:

Major versions:

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NPM stats.

React npm stats

Last 10 releases:

Major versions:

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Last 10 releases:

Major versions:

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Last 10 releases:

Major versions:

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Last 10 releases:

Major versions:

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Last 10 releases:

Major versions:

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• Overview of the JavaScript ecosystem
• A JAVASCRIPT ECOSYSTEM OVERVIEW
• JavaScript Fatigue
• The current JavaScript churn, and its long-term effect on your business

• npm statistics
• Find out what websites are Built With
• Libscore - stats on JavaScript library usage
• the State of JavaScript Survey

I won't go into details of the details of a software release life cycle, as they can be easily check, e.g on Wikipedia. Here you can find meanings of the most common abbreviations:

• GA - General availability (a release); should be very stable and feature complete
• RC - Release candidate; probably feature complete and should be pretty stable - problems should be relatively rare and minor, but worth reporting to try to get them fixed for release.
• M - Milestone build - probably not feature complete; should be vaguely stable (i.e. it's more than just a nightly snapshot) but may still have problems.
• LTS - Long-term support; a type of special versions or editions of software designed to be supported for a longer than normal period.

software release life cycle

• awesome-graphql
• APIs-guru

• analysis of alpha, beta and rc releases
• summary of all frameworks releases
• github pages webpage to present data
• why release dates are different in graphql database and tags web?

diff between releases and tags. React data suggest that tag dates are better (see react ver. 0.10-0.12).

• download other libriaries
• changing charts to d3 to consider

pandoc -r markdown -w latex -o latex/outfile.tex README.md