AngularJS has become one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks for building dynamic, interactive web applications. Released in 2010 by Google, AngularJS provides helpful abstractions for manipulating the DOM and two-way data binding that radically simplifies front-end development. With over 1.5 million dependent repositories on GitHub, AngularJS has proven itself as a flexible, efficient way to create powerful single-page applications (SPAs).
However, even with AngularJS‘s robust core capabilities, many developers turn to AngularJS frameworks to augment functionality for specific domains and use cases. These frameworks build on top of AngularJS with sets of custom directives, services, UI components and other add-ons tailored to areas like mobile development, UI design, video, and more.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the diverse ecosystem of AngularJS frameworks available to developers. We‘ll cover:
- Brief background on AngularJS
- Overview of frameworks
- Details on 8 popular AngularJS frameworks
- Comparative analysis of capabilities and use cases
- Trends and future outlook
Whether you‘re just starting with AngularJS or looking to expand your skillset, this guide aims to serve as an approachable yet thorough resource on frameworks to help accelerate and enhance your next web project.
A Brief Background on AngularJS
Before diving into frameworks, let‘s quickly recap what AngularJS is and why it has become so widely adopted.
AngularJS is a structural JavaScript framework for dynamic web apps. Here some of its key capabilities:
- Provides helpful abstractions for manipulating DOM elements
- Features two-way data binding between models and views
- Follows MVC architecture, separating concerns of models, views, controllers
- Uses dependency injection and modules for modularized code
- Extensible with directives that create custom HTML tags
- Focuses on SPAs and responsive UIs with partial page updates
With these and other features, AngularJS eliminates much boilerplate code you‘d write otherwise, making development faster. It also helps create testable, maintainable code by promoting best practices like MVC.
As a full-fledged MVC framework, AngularJS reduces time spent writing common app functionality from scratch. It enables developers to focus on the app-specific logic. AngularJS is also opinionated in how it structures apps, making applications predictable to debug and navigate.
With powerful core capabilities and design paradigms that simplify front-end complexity, it‘s no wonder AngularJS is one of the most popular frameworks around.
The Role of Frameworks with AngularJS
While AngularJS provides excellent support for most general use cases, developers often utilize AngularJS frameworks for additional functionality tailored to certain domains or project types.
For example, you might use a specialized AngularJS framework when building:
- A mobile app with native functionality and UI components
- Highly animated and media-rich web apps like games or video editors
- Dashboards for data visualization that require complex charts/graphs
- Apps demanding advanced routing and navigation features
- And more
In essence, AngularJS frameworks build on top of AngularJS with extra tools and abstractions in the form of:
- Directives – Custom HTML elements and attributes
- Modules – Reusable code units for specialized tasks
- Services – Objects for business logic reuse
- Filters – Format data before displaying
- UI Components – Widgets like forms, menus, buttons
These framework extensions make it faster to develop apps with specific needs vs building custom solutions from scratch. Most frameworks are also open source with community support, adding to their appeal.
Now that we‘ve covered the purpose of AngularJS frameworks, let‘s explore some popular options available today.
8 Feature-Packed AngularJS Frameworks
There are dozens of useful AngularJS frameworks – many more than we can cover here. We‘ll focus on 8 compelling options that demonstrate the diversity of capabilities frameworks offer.
For each framework, we‘ll briefly describe its utility and key features that set it apart.
1. Ionic
Ionic is an open source framework optimized for building hybrid mobile apps using web technologies. Apps run natively thanks to Apache Cordova wrappers around native SDKs.
With Ionic, you can build iOS, Android and desktop apps with HTML, CSS and AngularJS that look and feel native. Key features include:
- Mobile-optimized UI elements like buttons, menus, lists, forms
- Smooth animations, gestures, transitions following material design
- Easy access to native device functionality like camera, GPS, sensors
- Live reload for rapid development cycles
- Single codebase that compiles for multiple platforms
- Theming to customize look and feel
Ionic does much of the heavy lifting related to mobile-optimized UIs, interactions and device APIs so you can focus business logic specific to your app. With over 5 million apps built, it‘s the go-to framework for hybrid mobile development.
2. LumX
LumX is an AngularJS framework implementing Google‘s Material Design specs for slick user interfaces. Material Design promotes visual, animated, responsive design adapted to multiple devices and platforms.
As a Material Design framework tailored for AngularJS, LumX makes it easy to build apps aligned with Google UI/UX standards featuring:
- Visually striking design with bold use of color, space, imagery
- Prominent use of shadows, depth, and feedback animations
- Adaptive layouts suited for any device size
- Whitespace and grid-based compositions
LumX includes 30+ UI components like cards, dialogs, dropdowns, tabs, data tables and more designed for web/mobile following Material Design principles. This speeds up crafting professional-grade UIs.
3. Mobile Angular UI
Mobile Angular UI brings touch-optimized web UIs to AngularJS apps. It has components tailored for finger-friendly interaction critical on mobile.
Key features include:
- FastClick and Overthrow libraries to improve mobile performance
- Touch event handling for swipes, taps, scrolling
- Components like switchers, sidebars, scrollable areas
- overlays for popups, action sheets, loading dialogs
- Active support from developers (+4k GitHub stars)
By providing mobile-first widgets and behavior, Mobile Angular UI simplifies responsive application development across devices.
4. Angular Material
Like LumX, Angular Material is a UI framework implementing Google‘s Material Design specification. Maintained by the AngularJS core team, it offers 30+ UI components covering most common app elements required.
Standout features include:
- Components follow material design for visual consistency
- Responsive layout and styling that adapts to screens
- Widgets like buttons, cards, chips, tooltips, tables
- Robust documentation and theming capacity
- Built on AngularJS‘s MVC architecture
- Customizable Sass-based styling
As an officially supported library, Angular Material is a safe choice for apps seeking Material Design compliance. The comprehensive components allow focusing more on app needs rather than base UI building blocks.
5. UI Bootstrap
UI Bootstrap integrates Bootstrap CSS with AngularJS using directives. Bootstrap is the most popular CSS framework known for responsive, mobile-friendly styling.
By Angular-izing Bootstrap components, UI Bootstrap makes applying Bootstrap simple and declarative via custom attributes vs JavaScript. For example, modals, carousels, accordions and other widgets work via attributes rather than JS initialization.
Benefits of UI Bootstrap include:
- Streamlined Bootstrap integration without jQuery
- 70+ directives implementing Bootstrap widgets
- Robust theming capacity with LESS/SASS compilation
- Add-on modules like Datepickers and Timepickers
For apps already using Bootstrap that want tighter integration, UI Bootstrap is a logical choice to avoid jQuery dependency while harnessing Bootstrap‘s responsive styling and extensible components.
6. Supersonic
Supersonic bills itself a framework for rapid hybrid mobile app development. Using web technologies through Apache Cordova, it abstracts native mobile APIs for simpler cross-platform development.
Key features include:
- AngularJS bindings to native mobile device capabilities
- Reusable UI components like navbars, menus, inputs, buttons
- Modules for device functionality like Camera, Storage, Geolocation
- Live code syncing and reload during development
- Integration with AppGyver for advanced features
- Extensive docs and developer evangelism from AppGyver
With phonegap integration and UI elements designed for mobile, Supersonic speeds up mobile app UI construction and connecting device hardware APIs.
7. Videogular
Videogular specializes in custom HTML5 video players decked with skins, plugins, ads and more. Features include:
- Customizable video skinning
- YouTube/Vimeo plugins
- Advertising integration
- Responsive design for mobile
- Cue point system for tracking video progress
- Subtitle and multiple audio stream support
- HTML5 video events for analytics
For apps focused on video content, Videogular makes it simple to build unique video experiences while handling details of HTML5 video playback.
8. Other Notable Frameworks
There are many other excellent AngularJS frameworks worth noting:
- NgBoilerplate – Opinionated MV* framework promoting best practices
- AngularUI Router – Advanced routing and navigation
- AngularFire – AngularJS bindings for Firebase
- Angular UI Grid – Complex data grid widget
- Angular Bootstrap – Another Bootstrap widget integration
- Angular Admin – Template for admin dashboards / enterprise apps
- Angular Chart – Reusable charting in Line, Bar and Radar flavours
This list barely scratches the surface. Visit builtinangularjs.com and ngmodules.org to search thousands more based on your needs!
Comparing AngularJS Frameworks
With so many frameworks now covered, how do you determine what fits your app requirements? Let‘s compare them across a few key criteria:
| Framework | Mobile Focus | Material Design | Bootstrap | Charts/Data Visualization | Video |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ionic | ??? | ||||
| LumX | ??? | ||||
| Mobile Angular UI | ??? | ||||
| Angular Material | ??? | ||||
| UI Bootstrap | ??? | ||||
| Supersonic | ??? | ||||
| Videogular | ??? | ||||
| NgBoilerplate |
This view reveals some patterns in framework specialties:
- Mobile app development – Ionic, Mobile Angular UI and Supersonic
- Material Design – LumX and Angular Material
- Bootstrap integration – UI Bootstrap, Angular Bootstrap
- Data visualization – UI Grid, Angular Chart
- Video – Videogular
Fortunately many of these frameworks play well with each other. For example, apps could combine:
- Ionic + Angular Material for mobile Material Design UIs
- UI Bootstrap + Angular Chart for data dashboards
- Videogular + AngularFire for video streaming
So don‘t limit yourself to just one! Mix and match frameworks suited to your feature needs.
AngularJS Frameworks – What‘s Next?
We‘ve covered a lot of ground exploring AngularJS and add-on frameworks. Let‘s wrap up with a look at what the future may hold.
Angular – Google released a major rewrite called Angular (Angular 2+). While AngularJS remains widely used, many frameworks now support the latest Angular too.
React – Facebook‘s React has soared in popularity, competing directly with Angular in recent years. We‘re seeing both collaboration and fragmentation between Angular and React ecosystems. New apps may consider both when choosing frameworks.
Mobile – Mobile development remains hot, especially approaches allowing web developers to create mobile apps using JavaScript like React Native, NativeScript and Ionic. Expect mobile-focused frameworks to continue innovating in this direction.
Specialization – As Angular matures, we anticipate frameworks further specializing in domains like data visualization, prototyping, workflow, augmented reality and machine learning.
Of course no one can predict the future with certainty! But we foresee amazing progress ahead in further elevating what web developers can build using Angular and specialty frameworks together.
Conclusion
This guide explored the exciting universe of AngularJS frameworks available to enhance your next web project. We discussed:
- Core capabilities that make AngularJS so popular
- Why frameworks extend AngularJS for specialized domains
- Notable features of frameworks like Ionic, Videogular and others
- Strategies to evaluate and compare frameworks
- Emerging trends and possibilities on the horizon
Whether you‘re building enterprise dashboards, mobile apps or media-rich sites, these frameworks shortcut development significantly compared to coding custom solutions.
By providing structures aligned specifically to types of applications, they reduce boilerplate code and complexity. They empower you to build advanced functionality faster than ever using skills you already have.
So don‘t limit ideas to what plain AngularJS can provide. Discover which frameworks serve your needs and propel your apps to the next level!
I hope this guide paves the way to framework success. Let me know if you have any other questions!
