Picking a front-end framework/library
As we've already discussed in Chapter 2, The State of JavaScript, single-page applications (SPAs) are a great improvement over the more traditional multi-page applications (MPAs) that uses a client-server architecture. With SPAs, a lot of the logic that was traditionally done on the server has been delegated to the client. This means there'll be less load on the server, and the application can respond more quickly to user interaction. Therefore, for our client application, we will be building an SPA. Now, the next step is to pick a technology stack for our SPA.
Vanilla JavaScript vs. frameworks
SPAs are often discussed in conjunction with popular frameworks and libraries, such as AngularJS/Angular, React, Vue.js, Ember, and Meteor; but we should remember that SPAs can be written with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript alone. We may also choose to employ utility libraries, such as jQuery, to abstract away prickly web APIs, such as XMLHttpRequest
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