2018 JavaScript Rising Stars

These are the hottest projects of the year, all categories included.

For the third time in a row, Vue.js is the trendiest project of the year.

It got 45k stars overs the last 12 months, it's 5,000 more stars than in 2017... the momentum is still there!

At position number 4, Deno is the only new project among the TOP 10.

Deno is "a program for executing JavaScript and TypeScript outside of the web browser."

According to its creator Ryan Dahl (the father of Node.js), this secure TypeScript runtime is an attempt of addressing several issues about Node.js. Watch his video presentation.

In the battlefield of the front-end framework category, the 3 dominant actors were the same than in 2017: Vue.js, React and Angular.

If you check the graph, you may notice a peak of stars in June for both Vue.js and React. The reason? It was the time Vue.js passed React in terms of total number of stars, becoming the most popular project in the UI frameworks category. At that time, fans from both sides did their best to push their champion!

The newcomer in 2018 is Omi, a very promising UI framework that takes advantage of the Shadow DOM technology, while using the "JSX" syntax, familiar to React developers.

The 2 leading Node.js frameworks in 2018 are "full-stack frameworks" related to a specific front-end framework:

• Next.js, the new champion of the category, uses React
• Nuxt uses Vue.js.

They both provide a great developer experience to set up Single-Page Applications, while providing Server-Side Rendering features.

At position number 4 Express, the number one in 2017, stays very popular, despite its age.

No surprise in the React eco-system category, the project number one in 2018 is Create React App, the de-facto tool to start a new React application.

The version 2 was released in 2018, it was a major upgrade that includes the version 4 of Webpack and the possibility to use TypeScript.

About the React library itself, the introduction of hooks is a major addition, that may change a lot of things about the way we deal with state management and side effects with React.

Vue.js momentum is still growing, the version 3 should take advantage of modern browsers abilities to make it even faster and easier to use.

Vue Element Admin, the most popular project of the Vue.js ecosystem, is a solution to build beautiful dashboards using Vue.js components.

vue-cli is the standard solution to build a new Vue.js application, using the modern JavaScript tooling.

It can be compared to Create React App for React but it's more flexible and it provides a Graphical User Interface that makes it very user-friendly.

Not one but two major upgrades in the Angular ecosystem in 2018!

Angular version 6, introduced in May, provides a lot of features related to the tooling.

As a consequence, the trendiest project of the Angular ecosystem was Angular CLI the official command line tool used to scaffold new projects and manage existing projects.

Among the new features, the update command makes it easy to update an application and its dependencies. Also, it's now possible to customize the underlying Webpack configuration without "ejecting".

Angular version 7 was announced in October.

It includes Angular CLI prompts, an upgrade of Material Design for Angular, and focuses on performance improvements, with a feature called "Virtual Scrolling".

React Native is still the leading solution to create mobile applications using the JavaScript language.

Airbnb recently published a thorough series of article explaining why they decided to drop React Native for their next products in favor of Native Apps.

For people who want to use Vue.js instead of React, there are several choices.

The 4 following projects of the category (Weex, NativeScript, Quasar and Ionic) all support Vue.js as the view layer to build mobile applications.

It's not a JavaScript project because it uses the Dart language but Flutter from Google is a great alternative to build cross-environment mobile applications.

There were discussions in the past about the best way to introduce static typing to JavaScript.

In 2018, it seems that TypeScript, from Microsoft took a big advantage over its arch-rival Flow, from Facebook.

The fact that the latest version of Babel supports TypeScript was a game changer. As of NO slug create-react-app 2.1 and later, TypeScript works out of the box in a React application.

TypeScript is almost a standard for development: whether it's back-end or front-end development, we see more and more libraries that include TypeScript definitions. And if types are not provided by the library itself, the project DefinitelyTyped provides types for thousands of JavaScript projects.

Parcel confirms its success of 2017, developers love the ability of setting up a new web project without any configuration.

Webpack is still the most popular and flexible build tool, Create React App, vue-cli and Angular CLI all use it under the hood. The version 4 includes performance improvements (about both build times and bundle sizes) and "sensible defaults" that make possible to use Webpack with zero configuration.

No change in the testing framework landscape in 2018, the 5 leading solutions are the same as in 2017, in the same order.

Jest increased its advance over its contenders, developers appreciate the efforts made by Facebook to provide a full-featured testing framework that can be used to test both front-end (it was intended to test React components, in the beginning) and back-end code, without requiring configuration.

VS Code, the 3rd trendiest project overall, is almost the de-facto IDE for web development.

It stands up with its auto-completion features and its TypeScript integration.

The killer feature may be the debugging abilities for Node.js.

There is still no consensus about the best way to style modern web applications, made of components (whether it's React, Vue.js or Angular).

But Styled Components has still the best momentum and seems to be the most popular "component-based styling" solution.

Like in 2017, Gatsby was the most popular Static Site Generator (a tool to generate a bunch of HTML JavaScript and CSS files that can be hosted anywhere to serve ultra-fast web sites) in 2018.

Gatsby shines with its versatility (you get the best of Single Page Applications and static web sites) and the focus on performance.

If you want to use Vue.js instead of React, VuePress or Nuxt, at position number 3 and 4, may be the right choice.

The GraphQL ecosystem is picking up speed, and a big trend is the appearance of tools that simplify part of the process of setting up a GraphQL endpoint.

Gatsby is still number one, and it's definitely one of the tools that make getting started with GraphQL the most approachable.

Graphcool evolved into Prisma at number two, while Hasura GraphQL Engine also helps you generate a working back-end straight from your database.

And the rest of the top 15 is filled out by GraphQL servers, clients, and various other utilities such as GraphQL Playground.

As JavaScript continues to rise in popularity, so do many learning resources that aim to help developers master the language and its complex ecosystem.

The top learning resources of 2018 fall roughly into two categories: Tutorials & Cheatsheets and Guidelines & Best Practices.

The former consists of projects such as 30 seconds of code, You Don't know JS and JS Algorithms & Data Structures. These projects provide free high-quality learning resources that explain both programming concepts and some of JavaScript's particular nuances by example, allowing developers to write usable code while slowly gaining an understanding of the JavaScript ecosystem.

The latter consists of projects such as Airbnb Style Guide, Node.js Best Practices and Front-End Checklist. Resources like these help teams of developers maintain JavaScript projects while keeping their code style consistent and ensuring that their codebases are easy to understand, which in turn allows new contributors to join these communities and help them grow.