The State of Javascript 2018. What Technologies Are in Use by 20,000 Javascript Developers in 2018?

The original article was published here.

This survey is well-known with developers since 2016. And what is more important, with a pinch of analysis, The State of JavaScript 2018 can help business to create new successful products. The scope of technologies that are in use by 20,000 JavaScript developers in 2018 can tell a lot about the industry, trends, dominating leaders and even predict some demand for the new products developed using the most popular JS frameworks.

When you choose a technology for your next startup or improving the existing project to be scalable and fast, how will you choose the future technology stack? This is where ‘JS evaluating points‘ shines. But this is a subjective approach. And to see the whole picture and pick the best solutions you have to listen to the community. This is why Syndicode pays attention to The State of JavaScript 2018 survey. This year developers also replied why they were using a particular library.

Because this is the third edition of the survey, now it is presented with the historical data over the past two years.  Now you can see longer-term trends to predict the new demand.

Short Summary

Apart from traditional data about:

• Demographics (153 countries, 24% of representatives from the US, the lowest salary in Venezuela),
• Connections between technologies,
• JavaScript Flavors (languages and dialects that compile to JavaScript, 86,3% of respondents used ES6 and would like to use it again),
• Frontend frameworks (as we predicted, this year the two main contestants are React.js and Vue.js),

How developers are satisfied with frontend libraries vs how many users they have

• Data layer (it groups all the technologies used to transmit and manage data),
• Backend frameworks (64,7% of respondents are happy with Express.js, the state of JS backend frameworks didn’t change much since 2016),
• Testing (this year developers are satisfied with available testing solutions),
• Mobile & desktop (see how JS expands the limits of the browser with React Native and Electron), and
• Other tools, you will have the access to developers’ personal opinions that reveal that 51,2% of developers think that JavaScript is moving in the right direction…

The State of JavaScript 2018 Conclusions

1. Vue vs. React, and Angular.js fail
   Two years ago, 27% of respondents had never even heard of Vue.js library. Today, that fraction has fallen to just 1.3%. So while React still has a much larger share of the market, Vue’s meteoric rise certainly shows no sign of stopping. In fact, Vue has already overtaken its rival for certain metrics such as total GitHub stars.
   Sadly, there is a huge percentage of Angular users that would like not to use this framework again. Angular satisfaction ratio – 41% of disappointing. Dear fellows, there are too many Angular projects on the web, so you wouldn’t be able to stop using it so easily.
   That means that you definitely should consider Vue.js for your next project.
2. Among data fetching and data management tools Redux obtained 82% satisfaction rate. In two years, GraphQL users went from 5% to 20%, and their client of choice seems to be Apollo. Moreover, the latest version of Apollo makes using Redux optional.
   That means that you should take a closer look at Apollo.
3. Taking into account backend frameworks we must say that Express is still dominating. But lately, Next.js has been generating a lot of interest. Although it’s not quite comparable to a full-featured Node back-end, its single-minded focus on solving the server-side-rendering problem for React apps has made it a very useful tool.
   At the same time, many developers heard about Meteor, but not really interested in it.
4. GraphQL is sure to start making bigger and bigger waves in the area. Take GraphQL into account.
5. React Native and Electron are the two leading solutions to build mobile and desktop apps using web technologies. But, for instance, Airbnb recently published a series of article explaining why they decided to drop React Native for their next products in favor of Native Apps. We advise you to explore new promising solutions from Google:

• Carlo, a brand new Node app framework that is built on top of Puppeteer; and
• Flutter that compiles to true native code. But the code is written in Dart, so at the end of the day React Native will be still relevant to most of JavaScript developers already familiar with the React system.

p.s. Here you can find the post by Sacha Grief with some details about how the survey was held.