Understanding client-side JavaScript frameworks – Learn web development | MDN

JavaScript frameworks are an essential part of modern front-end web development, providing developers with tried and tested tools for building scalable, interactive web applications. Many modern companies use frameworks as a standard part of their tooling, so many front-end development jobs now require framework experience. In this set of articles, we are aiming to give you a comfortable starting point to help you begin learning frameworks.

As an aspiring front-end developer, it can be hard to work out where to begin when learning frameworks — there are so many different frameworks to choose from, new ones appear all the time, they mostly work in a similar way but do some things differently, and there are some specific things to be careful about when using frameworks.

We are not aiming to exhaustively teach you everything you need to know about React/ReactDOM, or Vue, or some other specific framework; the framework teams’ own docs (and other resources) do that job already. Instead, we want to back up and first answer more fundamental questions such as:

  • Why should I use a framework? What problems do they solve for me?
  • What questions should I ask when trying to choose a framework? Do I even need to use a framework?
  • What features do frameworks have? How do they work in general, and how do frameworks’ implementations of these features differ?
  • How do they relate to “vanilla” JavaScript or HTML?

After that, we’ll provide some tutorials covering the essentials of some of the different framework choices, to provide you with enough context and familiarity to start going into greater depth yourself. We want you to go forward and learn about frameworks in a pragmatic way that doesn’t forget about web platform fundamental best practices such as accessibility.

Get started now, with “Introduction to client-side frameworks”