(T) The challenge for front-end Web developers is the multiplication of tools, some of them with a short life cycle:  jQuery, Dojo, Modernizr, BackBone.js, Angular,js, Yeoman! Who knows what will be the winning tool, and when a tool will be replaced by another one. There are so many topics about Web client-side development, that the major vendors created WebPlatform.org to document Web development. In the mobile space, every major player BlackBerry, Apple, Google or Microsoft has its own operating system and set of development tools, so the developer has to learn the platform tool in order to develop for that platform. But for Web development, it is a completely different story! Paul Irish, the author of Moderniz, has well captured that challenge in one of his slides below:

I have attended many HTML 5 conferences and meet-ups, but I can see that among those many tools, one has already won the heart of developers: jQuery; while another one seems to get some significant traction: Angular.js.

jQuery:
jQuery is a multi-browser JavaScript library to simplify front-end scripting for Web applications. jQuery’s syntax is designed to make it easier to navigate an HTML document, select DOM elements, create animations, handle events, and develop Ajax applications. jQuery also provides capabilities for developers to create plug-ins on top of the JavaScript library. This enables the design of abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects, and theme-able widgets for dynamic Web pages.

jQuery was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig. It is currently developed by a team of developers led by Dave Methvin

It is used by over 60% of Web sites and is open source under the MIT License.

Angular.js:
Angular shares the same development goals as Backbone.js which is an older tool than Angular. Both are designed to develop JavaScript Single-Page Web Application (SPA) that relies on the communication to the server through a RESTful API.

Angular is based on a Model View View Model (MVVM): Models talk to ViewModel objects which listen for changes to the Models (while Backbone is based on the Model View Presenter (MVP). Both models does not require any controller as in the Model View Controller (MVC)).

Angular has a much richer framework that has templates, syntax, and tests. The developer needs to learn more but will do more. In particular, Angular adds to HTML new custom tag attributes that simplify the manipulation of DOM through the use of “directives”. It binds input or output parts of the page to the MVVM model represented by standard JavaScript variables. The values of those JavaScript variables can be manually set, or retrieved from static or dynamic JSON resources.

Angular was originally developed in 2009 by Miško Hevery and Adam Abrons at Google, which continues to develop and maintain Angular.js as open source project under the MIT License.

At the last HTML 5 Developer Conference in San Francisco, Misko has shared his thoughts about potential future features for Angular: What is in store for the future of AngularJS?

Note: The picture above is about the automatic initialization in Angular.

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