Branden Metcalfe

d3Bring data to life with SVG, Canvas and HTML. 📊📈🎉

State of the art charting library. Unlimited capabilities, seriously, you can do almost anything with it. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty hard to use. You might want to consider a wrapper to keep things simple like Recharts.

webpackA bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows for loading parts of the application on demand. Through "loaders", modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

I've been using Webpack for 3 years across many different projects. Pros: it's immensely popular, very mature, and has a large ecosystem of plugins Cons: it requires tonnes of configuration, and configuring it to perform anything is time consuming and difficult. I found myself ending out with a long configuration file and dependent upon many plugins. Also, I'd mention that build times tend to become quite long as your project grows. I spent too much time troubleshooting Webpack configuration issues, until a friend told me about Parcel. I've moved to Parcel, which offers sensible default configuration without requiring 10 plugins, and I decided Parcel would be my module bundler of choice. If you already use Webpack and it works for you, then I say keep using it. However, if you start a new project, I'd seriously consider giving Parcel instead. Might save you hours of debugging and StackOverflowing. You'll thank me later.

nextThe React Framework

Next itself is pretty good, and the community around it is great and growing. The downside is that making sure your code works perfectly whenever rendered on the server AND client adds a lot of overhead as opposed to simply writing a SPA.

rollupNext-generation ES module bundler

I had a short experience with rollup and it's a legit module bundler, with support for tree shaking / dead code elimination. While not as popular as Parcel or Webpack, it does have a growing community and very responsive maintainers. Would recommend it if you need a bundler for an npm package/module. If Rollup is good enough for React, it's good enough for you: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/9327

semantic-uiSemantic is a UI component framework based around useful principles from natural language.

If you're looking for a highly-themeable UI framework, look no further. Semantic UI offers a flexible, unopinionated framework for creating user interfaces. The default design is aesthetic and simple, and you can easily create your own color themes and customize the look & feel of elements. The built in grid and responsiveness support is also sublime. Recommended!

antdAn enterprise-class UI design language and React UI library

A very capable design system, especially for Enterprise apps. Includes every imaginable component you could ask for. Design is minimalistic and clean, as you'd want an enterprise app to be. Since it doesn't have some of the eye candy offered by Material UI, it's also faster and less janky. Documentation is pretty decent, and the community around Ant very large (although some of it is in Chinese which I unfortunately do not speak). Overall great experience.

bootstrapThe most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Pros: huge community, tonnes of professional templates, themes and plugins (even free ones), relatively easy to use, consistent UI across browsers Cons: strongly tied to jQuery which is totally out of fashion, so much boilerplate it can become slow on larger website, not so easy to make non-trivial customizations to the style and behavior, oh, and did I mention jQuery? Would recommend mostly if you're looking for a quick solution to build a large website with minimal amount of coding

parcelThe zero configuration build tool for the web. 📦🚀

Parcel is the perfect module bundler for JS applications. It just works. I've been using Webpack in the past, and found myself spending hours installing plugins, dealing with configuration issues, and reading StackOverflow posts to get it to work the way it should work. Parcel, on the contrary, is super easy to use. It just works out of the box, with sensible configuration, and no for installing additional dependencies (most of the time). It's quickly growing in popularity (almost 36K stars as for the time of this review), and has a pretty good community, although to be honest - you won't need it - since it just works. The only issue I found with Parcel is that it sometimes conflict with Dropbox (if used for the same directory), and starts rebuilding the bundle unnecessarily. This is really a small issue, compared with the numerous issues I had with Webpack. If you're still using Webpack, I suggest you take a look at Parcel for your next project, I found it to be significantly easier to use, faster, and most of all - less frustrating.

I've been dabbling around with Hyperapp V2 (good tutorial for people coming from React here: https://medium.com/@NickDodson/hyperapp-v2-in-under-5-minutes-7e9fa49f7f5) It's good if you're looking for a very lightweight UI library (less than 2KB), with a minimalistic approach and compatibility with the JSX syntax.

vue🖖 Vue.js is a progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.

I've used Vue in a recent project, and found that it it a flexible, modular and performant framework. Templating HTML is a breeze with Vue. Vue's community is very active, and I'd be happy if I get a chance to use it again in the future