

Finally, we had an easy-to-use JavaScript framework that treated HTML as a first-class citizen. The Golden Age of AngularĮven before Angular version 1.0 had been released, Angular took the front-end development world by storm. In 2010, that something better appeared-it was named Angular. The world was waiting for something better. None of these frameworks rocketed to popularity. Ember wanted to be the Six Million Dollar Man of the JavaScript world: rebuilt better, stronger, and faster. It took SproutCore, stripped it down to its bones, and tried to rebuild it into something truly web-friendly. A couple of early frameworks (Backbone and Knockout) appeared, and achieved a moderate amount of success.Įmber also showed up around this time. This left an opening for a framework that truly embraced the web, instead of trying to plaster over it and pretend it was something else. But it left passionate web developers out in the cold and made them feel as though their hard-won HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills weren’t valuable. Again, this was great for desktop developers. These frameworks even avoided JavaScript by transpiling other languages into JS. Several more frameworks popped up with similar goals GWT and Cappuccino were the most prominent. This ended up being great for former desktop developers who had been dragged kicking and screaming onto the web. It came with a complete set of widgets that made it possible to build complex web applications without even touching HTML or CSS. SproutCore was the first of these frameworks to take off. While these apps looked amazing to end-users, for the developers working on them, the apps quickly turned into hulking piles of technical debt that made the dev team dread heading to work in the morning.Īs a result, a few enterprising developers began to work on frameworks that would bring Gmail-like apps within easy reach of web developers everywhere. Some courageous developers managed to string together amazing single page apps using a combination of jQuery, duct tape, and hope. Gmail was a great demonstration of what was possible, but developing similar applications still felt out of reach for many. They relied heavily on Java, which alienated web developers who were used to working with JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and Python. The problem was that Google’s Closure tools weren’t very developer-friendly. Google even open-sourced the Closure toolkit-a set of libraries and an optimizing compiler that it used to build Gmail. When Google released Gmail, it showed the world that web apps really could replace complex desktop applications. It’s not that this wasn’t possible before. It was the first comprehensive JavaScript framework aimed at making it easy to build desktop-quality single-page web apps. Try GrapeCity's Tools for JavaScript and.
