Making Sense out of a Jungle of JavaScript Frameworks: towards a Practitioner-friendly Comparative Analysis

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a comprehensive, practitioner-friendly framework to compare JavaScript frameworks, addressing the gap between research metrics and practical decision-making in web development.

Contribution

It proposes a research design for a comparative analysis framework that integrates both researcher and practitioner needs for JavaScript frameworks.

Findings

Highlights the lack of practical tools for JSF selection

Proposes a new research framework for JSF comparison

Calls for merging research metrics with practitioner concerns

Abstract

The field of Web development is entering the HTML5 and CSS3 era and JavaScript is becoming increasingly influential. A large number of JavaScript frameworks have been recently promoted. Practitioners applying the latest technologies need to choose a suitable JavaScript framework (JSF) in order to abstract the frustrating and complicated coding steps and to provide a cross-browser compatibility. Apart from benchmark suites and recommendation from experts, there is little research helping practitioners to select the most suitable JSF to a given situation. The few proposals employ software metrics on the JSF, but practitioners are driven by different concerns when choosing a JSF. As an answer to the critical needs, this paper is a call for action. It proposes a re-search design towards a comparative analysis framework of JSF, which merges researcher needs and practitioner needs.