This is the 10th edition of JavaScript Rising Stars. I've been building this annual report for a decade now, tracking the most popular projects in the JavaScript ecosystem based on GitHub stars.
The report includes expert insights from guest writers, experts in their field (Jack Herrington, Jamie Birch, Sébastien Lorber...)
Hope you enjoy it!
This is Michael the author, thank you all for your feedback!
This timeline was like a game, trying to find a balance between projects that made the history and bets for the future.
The disclaimer explains some of the rules but of course the result is not perfect.
I should have added that all projects mentioned are GitHub projects tracked by Best of JS app (the app I created in 2015)
I totally agree about the importance of Firebug that I discovered in 2005 or 2006.
Being able to debug JavaScript was such a liberation!
JavaScript was no more just a toy language.
I also agree about some projects should have been mentioned, at least in the disclaimer, mainly Backbone and its friend Underscore because at the beginning of 2010s, it was a kind of standard to build clean apps in the browser, using a MVC pattern.
In addition of the Rising Stars projects https://risingstars.js.org/ that provides an overview by year, this timeline was the first attempt to provide a big picture about the landscape of the 10 last years, I will try to create something more thorough soon.
Jest improved so much since its first release, in the beginning it was mentioned only to test React components. Ava made the speed its first selling argument but Jest may be even faster, now... Thank you for your remark, we are going to update the comments accordingly, to say only "AVA emphasises on speed", removing "Compared to Jest".
Michael speaking, from Best of JavaScript project. One year ago, when "JavaScript Rising Stars 2016" was published, the topic was hot on HackerNews, there were a lot of questions about the data.
What was compiled here is only the variation of the numbers of stars on GitHub, over the span of one year.
Of course it's just one metrics we picked, but we hope it will give you a good understanding of what was the JavaScript landscape in 2017.
About the first part of the question, Meteor is still a thing for several reasons:
* It's a project with a strong community (364 contributors) that still has traction among developers (+ 8 stars by day on average over the last month, check the numbers here https://bestof.js.org/projects/meteor)
* They keep moving in the right direction: moving away from their own package manager (https://atmospherejs.com/) to NPM, accepting ES6 syntax everywhere, client and server-side without config, enabling AngularJS or React for the front-end layer... Since Meteor 1.6 version, they use under the hood one of the latest versions of node.js.
* Other contenders with such a combination "no config / real time / full-stack JS" features out of the box have less traction (check some contenders here https://bestof.js.org/tags/fullstack)
Some great projects on GitHub are built on top of Meteor:
The drawback is that the Meteor is quite opinionated about a lot of things, it's a monster of its own, blurring the boundary between client and server-side code. It can be difficult to debug, test, deploy and scale.
So there is no definitive answer about the question "Should I use it in production?".
The team behind Meteor is really committed to keep on moving forward, GraphQL and Apollo support are coming soon, the post about the latest release gives interesting insight about their vision: https://blog.meteor.com/announcing-meteor-1-6-abf30f29e2c6
The author said that, at the end of the process, "Meteor may look less like a framework and more like a library of middleware that can be used in any existing application, JavaScript or otherwise".
One important thing is that they move forward steadily, without breaking things, which is important when you run applications in production.
Hello there, this is Michael Rambeau, the writer of JavaScript Rising Stars.
Thank you, everyone, for your comments.
It's very nice to see people talking about things related to my project.
As some people mentioned, after the initial release, there was an issue about the count of stars, for some projects.
I'm sorry about that, it has been fixed during the following releases.
I will try to take into account the ideas discussed there, when things calm down.
Thank you a lot!
The report includes expert insights from guest writers, experts in their field (Jack Herrington, Jamie Birch, Sébastien Lorber...) Hope you enjoy it!