42 Great JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks for Front-End Developers
React
React is an open-source JavaScript library used to build interfaces for web applications. It allows you to create complex UIs from small, independent, and reusable pieces of code. Also, it’s maintained and developed by Facebook, so you are completely assured about using this library for your project. There are many big companies using it for their website such as Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, WhatsApp, etc.
Vue.js
Vue.js is a free and compact open-source library that helps you build user interfaces quickly (especially for single-page web applications). It was developed by Evan You (a programmer at Google) in 2014 and achieved 2nd place in the rankings of front-end JavaScript Framework 2019. In my opinion, some of the benefits of Vue are that it is easier to learn and absorb than other frameworks, the documentation is extremely detailed and easy to understand.
AngularJS
AngularJS, like the two frameworks above, makes it easy for you to build web and mobile applications. It is trusted and used by many big companies such as Google, Forbes, IBM, Microsoft, etc.
jQuery
jQuery is one of the most commonly used libraries by front-end developers. It is a small, free, open-source library that provides many useful features for website development such as AJAX, manipulation of the DOM (CSS, HTML) easily, handling events, animation effects, etc.
Lodash
Lodash helps you to handle problems related to arrays, strings, numbers, objects in JavaScript with ease.
Anime.js
Anime.js is a library that makes it easy to build fast animations for web pages by working with CSS properties, SVG, DOM properties, JavaScript objects.
AOS
AOS helps you create animation effects for website elements when users scroll the web page.
Popper
Popper is a library written in JavaScript with a size of only about 3kB to help you improve the speed of the website while still retaining the functions that a tooltip needs. It is commonly used in libraries popular nowadays such as Bootstrap, Foundation, Material-UI. In my opinion, it helps us to solve a common problem in tooltips, which is determining the position of the element and displaying it as best as possible on the different device screens.
Owl Carousel 2
Owl Carousel 2 is an open-source library that helps you build aesthetic carousels easily. With more than 60 different types of carousel, it supports touch and drop feature on mobiles to improve the user experience. It is responsive on many different device screens, the library is divided into many small modules which helps to reduce unnecessary plugins when used in the project.
What I like about this library is it has many detailed examples for each function, making it easy for you to set up as well as build. Carousel is suitable for my web project with its autoplay function, usability with video, customizable motion effects, etc. You can see more on its demo page!
D3.js
D3.js is a JavaScript library built for data visualization and rendering via SVG, Canvas, HTML. It’s open-source, downloaded more than 1 million times a week through npm. The above data can help us understand somewhat its popularity. Also, it provides many built-in examples to help you learn how to apply D3.js to your website. However, it also has some limitations such as that it is difficult to use for beginners initially or the fact that it won’t work on older browsers like IE8.
DarkModeJS
DarkModeJS library helps us to automatically make UI changes over time. Modes can be switched at the request of the user. You can create your own CSS files, contrast yourself and set them through DarkModeJS.
Chart.js
The Chart.js library helps you create beautiful charts for your website. It has a lot of charts and allows us to flexibly handle the data passed to the chart when using the library. It is also regularly updated with new versions and is responsive on many different device screens.
SweetAlert
SweetAlert is an open-source library that helps you to quickly build website notifications with high aesthetics and many beautiful motion effects. To use it for our website is very simple. You just need to call sweetalert.min.js file via CDN and define basic properties for the message such as title(title), text(content), icon. Also, you can add attributes and other functionalities like buttons, rendering via Ajax, using promise for modal, etc.
highlight.js
Highlight.js is an open-source library built with JavaScript that helps you highlight code on the website and can run in both the browser as well as on the server. Some strengths of the library: it is independent of any framework; has the ability to automatically detect the language on your website; supports more than 189 popular programming languages; provides 94 more styles for the code snippets on the web page. What I like about this library is that you can reduce the size of highlight.js by removing programming languages that you do not use in the download process. For server-side, you can then use yarn or npm to install it.
VideoJS
VideoJS is a video player built from the HTML5 Video platform that supports a wide range of formats such as YouTube and Vimeo streaming. It was developed in the mid-2010s. Hundreds of programmers contribute to the project and more than 450,000 websites are using this library. Some strengths of VideoJS: designed with high aesthetics, has many themes to choose from, suitable for media players, can run on both computers and phones, provides more than 100 plugins to help you calculate as well as add new features easily.
Moment.js
Moment.js makes it easy to handle date and time with JavaScript.
PixiJS
Create beautiful digital content with the fastest, most flexible 2D WebGL renderer.
Webpack
Webpack is a static module packaging tool for modern JavaScript applications.
fullPage.js
fullPage.js helps you create fullscreen scrolling for websites.
Howler.js
Howler.js is an open-source JavaScript library with a size of only about 7KB to help you easily create and process audio for web pages. With the combination of API and HTML5 Audio, it can run on many different platforms and web browsers including IE9 and Cordova. Some strong points of Howler.js: it’s easily extensible through modular architecture, supports most file types such as MP3, MPEG, OPUS, OGG, OGA, WAV, AAC, CAF, M4A, etc, its automatic caching helps increase performance of the website as well as the bandwidth of the server. In addition, it also provides you with a number of attributes to fine-tune the media player to fit the site such as determining the initial volume, autoplay option, dynamical song repeat, etc.
Masonry
It is a library that makes it easy to create complex grid layouts for your website (especially for images).
Screenfull
Screenfull helps to turn elements or web pages into full-screen mode.
particles.js
Particles.js is a free and open-source library that allows you to create and refine beautiful backgrounds for your website.
Leaflet
Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for interacting with maps on mobile devices.
SortableJS
SortableJS is a JavaScript library that adds drag and drop functionality to HTML5.
clipboard.js
Clipboard makes it possible to quickly copy the content of the web page to the clipboard.
Underscore.js
Underscore.js is a JavaScript library that provides you with useful functions to solve common programming problems.
Cleave.js
Cleave makes it easy to reformat the input element as the user is typing information.
Share
The Share library makes it possible for users to select what text they want in a web page and share it right away immediately to Facebook or Twitter. Its size is also very light, only about 8KB.
Chardin.js
The Chardin.js library helps us to display the instructions for the components on the web page. It helps explain more about component functions to make it easier for users to understand and use.
Flip
Flip is a plugin that allows you to quickly and easily create counters with flip effects. If you need to create event timers, promotions, fundraising campaigns, I think this is the best library for you.
Image Compare Viewer
Image Compare Viewer is an open-source library built with JavaScript that allows you to compare two images directly on the web page. It is often used to compare images before and after editing to help users have a visual look and distinguish clearly clearer.
Notyf
Notyf is a JavaScript library that helps you create toast notifications for web pages with a size of only about 3KB. It is responsively displayed on many different device screens and easy to use with today’s popular JS frameworks like React, Angular, Aurelia, Vue, and Svelte.
Dinero.js
Dinero.js is a JavaScript library that provides many features to help you work and solve problems. Currency-related topics are on the website.
simpleParallax.js
simpleParallax.js is an open-source JavaScript library of compact size. It will help you to create a simple and easy parallax effect for your website’s images.
Duet Date Picker
Duet Date Picker is an open-source code developed by Duet Design Systems. It allows you to build easily build a date picker component for your website without any extra usage or any additional libraries. Some of the features that I like in this library are dark and light themes. You can set the time interval that the user is allowed to choose, set the date by region, etc.
Print.js
Print.js is a compact JavaScript library that allows you to print files directly on the web page without any problems. No need to redirect or use embeds. It supports printing in many formats such as PDF, HTML (e.g., forms), images, JSON, etc. In addition, it also runs on most popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera.
mathjs
Mathjs is an open-source math library with over 10.5k stars on Github for JavaScript and Node.js (running on the server-side). It gives you flexibility in calculating and dealing with many different data types such as numbers, big numbers, complex numbers, fractions, units, and matrices.
PROGRESSBAR
PROGRESSBAR is an open-source library built with JavaScript that makes it easy to show bar-based progress with different types of shapes. It is responsive on many popular devices these days. You can also set it up easily via npm, bower, or download to use. In addition, it also has a full page of instructions on the features we can use in this library and a demo page with pre-written code that makes it easier for you to apply it to your website.
Quill
Quill is an open-source editor, so feel free to use it for all types of commercial websites or non-commercial ones. It is built with many functions such as adding links, images, videos or more. What I like about Quill is how easy it is to set up and display on all modern and responsive web browsers on multiple device screens, with detailed tutorials on common problems when using it.
VALIDATE.JS
VALIDATE.JS is an open-source library that gives you a way to inspect JavaScript objects on the website. Its main goal is to set up validations in JSON forms and make them shareable between the browser and the server. It provides us with a lot of validation methods such as date, email, format, type checking of objects, etc. VALIDATE.JS can run on both environments — browser and server (Node.js). You can see more examples and usage on the demo page.
Mocha
Mocha is a framework that is widely used in web programming and supports both back-end (Node.js) and front-end. It helps you to perform asynchronous testing simply and easily. In addition, it also has a large support community of programmers, and many detailed instructions and examples. Companies, as well as large websites, trust and use it.
Summary
I hope the article will provide you with useful JavaScript libraries for web design and development. If you have any questions, just send an email and I will respond as soon as possible. Hope to see you again. Please continue to support the site so that I can write more good articles. Have a nice day!
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