Frameworks and Libraries that are high in demand
In today’s date, there are hardly any applications that have not been built using a framework or a library. They make development so much easier. They abstract out the underlying complexities and make it easier to implement what we want within a few lines of code. There are libraries and frameworks for different purposes but the majority of them are used for web application development and are JavaScript-based. With Machine Learning on the rise, there are a lot of python libraries as well that are used heavily for the same. Although many developers use frameworks and libraries rigorously, they fail to understand the difference between them. In this article, we will discuss what are frameworks and libraries, the difference between them, and then finally dive into the popular frameworks and libraries used to date.
What is a Framework?
Frameworks are something that provides a boilerplate to build applications. Frameworks are application-specific i.e. they have been built to solve a particular problem. For example, using python we can create whatever we want but Flask which is a python framework is used to build web applications only. Frameworks take care of the essentials so that we do not have to write everything from scratch and only focus on building the web application. For example, using flask we do not have to worry about writing code to handle ports, HTTP packets, HTTP requests, and responses from scratch.
What is a Library?
A Library is a collection of functions or modules that solves a specific problem. For Example, REACT is a JavaScript that solves the problem of DOM manipulation. If we were to create a user interface using vanilla JS, you can imagine the amount of work needed to put in to get the required result. On the other hand, REACT easily does that for us.
What Is the Key Difference Between Frameworks and Libraries?
A framework is where we put our code in. It provides a boilerplate and the framework is responsible for calling our code whereas our code calls the library. We import the library into our code. A framework comes with a complete package included with the codes that a library may solve. The key difference between frameworks and libraries is in the way the code is called. Frameworks are a complete package while libraries act as supporting materials.
Popular Libraries that are high in demand
With that in mind, let's see what are some of the most popular libraries and frameworks used in the industry.
1. Popular JavaScript Libraries that are high in demand
REACT
REACT is an open-source JavaScript library developed and maintained by Facebook. It is mainly used for building user interfaces. It is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries ever built and many top companies use it in their web applications.
D3.js
D3.js is a JavaScript library that is used for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It allows us to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model and then apply transformations to the document. We can use D3.js to generate an HTML table from an array of numbers.
jQuery
Before the advent of React and other libraries, DOM manipulation was a tough nut to crack. Back in the day's jQuery was used to ease out the task and is still relevant today. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler.
Lodash
Lodash is a JavaScript library that makes working with arrays, numbers, objects, and strings easier in JavaScript. Lodash is useful for iterating arrays, objects, strings, manipulating and testing values, and creating composite functions easier.
Underscore.js
Underscore.js is another JavaScript library that provides a whole bunch of helper functions to deal with array mapping, filtering, condition checking, etc. It is similar in spirit to Lodash.
2. Popular Python Libraries that are high in demand
TensorFlow
TensorFlow is a python library that is created by Google for machine learning. You can find a JavaScript version for it as well. It is used for easily creating machine learning models on the go.
Scikit- Learn
Scikit-Learn is another useful python library for machine learning. It provides a lot of tools for machine learning and statistical modeling that includes regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction.
NumPy
Numpy is a python library that adds support for working with large multi-dimensional arrays. It provides mathematical functions to operate on such arrays.
Pandas
Pandas is a python library that provides flexible and expressive data structures to make it easier for us to work with structured and time-series data.
Popular Frameworks that are high in demand
Read: "What is agile software development?"
1. Popular JavaScript Frameworks that are high in demand
Angular
Angular is a JavaScript Framework aimed at decoupling the application’s logic from DOM manipulation. The framework introduces many powerful features that allow developers to create rich, single-page applications quite easily.
Vue.js
Just like angular, Vue is another alternative JavaScript framework that aims at building user interfaces. The core library of this framework focuses mainly on the view layer.
Node.js
Node.js has changed the way we think of JavaScript. It allows us to run JavaScript outside the browser environment and thus allows us to write backend code in plain JavaScript.
2. Popular Python Frameworks that are high in demand
Django
Django is a very popular Python framework used for creating web applications. It comes up with a lot of things precooked such as a ready-made database, user authentication system, routing, and easy object-relational mapping techniques.
Flask Microframework
Flask is also a popular python framework but is less powerful than Django as developers have to rely on external libraries to fill in the requirements. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool and can be used to build small to medium-scale applications.
Web2py
Web2py is another open-source web application framework that is written in the Python programming language. It allows web developers to program dynamic web content plainly in python.
Pyramid
Among all the python frameworks we have mentioned, the pyramid is yet another alternative and you may want to give it a try as well. It offers a lot of things that other web frameworks have to offer.
There are obviously plenty of other frameworks and libraries out there in the wild that we have not covered but out of all those these are the most widely used and recognized in the industry. React and Angular are two of the most popular library and frameworks for web interfaces respectively that are trusted by a vast majority of developers. One reason is that they are backed by the tech giants Facebook and Google, respectively. If you want to keep yourself updated on machine learning libraries and frameworks, visit Kaggle. Libraries and Frameworks are something that keeps on updating from time to time and newer ones replace the older ones. Therefore, it is necessary to keep track of these changes because it is very essential for applications to keep in touch with the current trends.
