Vue.js an Overview

Vue.js is an open source progressive JavaScript library/framework for building interactive web/user interfaces which simplify web development. Vue.js is created by Evan You, an ex-employee from Google. The first version of Vue.js was released in February 2014. It recently has clocked to 64,828 stars on GitHub, making it very popular. The goal of Vue.js is to provide the benefits of reactive data binding and composable view components with an API that is as simple as possible.

The core library is focused on the view layer only, so it can be easily integrated into big projects for front-end development without any issues and is easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, when used in combination with proper tooling and supporting libraries, Vue.js is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications.

Vue.js is a reactive data-binding system that makes it extremely simple to keep your data and the DOM in sync. When using jQuery to manually manipulate the DOM, the code we write is often imperative, repetitive and error-prone. Vue.js embraces the concept of data-driven view. It means we use special syntax in our normal HTML templates to “bind” the DOM to the underlying data. Once the bindings are created, the DOM will then be kept in sync with the data. Whenever you modify the data, the DOM updates accordingly. As a result, most of our application logic is now directly manipulating data, rather than messing around with DOM updates.

The installation for Vue.js is very simple and easy to start with. Any developer can easily understand and build interactive web interfaces.

Features available with Vue.js.

Virtual DOM:
Vue.js makes the use of virtual DOM, which is also used by other frameworks too. The changes are not made to the DOM directly, instead a replica of the DOM is created. Whenever any changes are to be made, they are made to the JavaScript data structures and the latter is compared with the original data structure. Then the final changes are updated to the real DOM, which the end-user will see. This is good in terms of optimization, it is less expensive and the changes can be made at a faster rate.

Data Binding:
In Vue.js the data binding feature helps manipulate or assign values to HTML attributes, change the style, assign classes with the help of binding directive called “v-bind”.

Components:
Components are one of the important features of Vue.js that helps create custom elements, which can be reused in HTML.

Event Handling:
The attribute “v-on” added to the DOM elements to listen to the events in Vue.js.

Animation/Transition:
We can apply various transitions to HTML elements using Vue.js when they are added or updated or removed from the DOM. Vue.js has a built-in transition component that needs to be wrapped around the element for transition effect. We can easily add third party animation libraries and also add more interactivity to the interface.

Computed Properties:
It helps to listen to the changes made to the UI elements and performs the necessary calculations. No need of additional coding for this.

Templates:
Vue.js provides HTML-based templates that bind the DOM with the “Vue instance data”. Vue compiles the templates into virtual DOM Render functions and we can make use of the template of the render functions. To do so we have to replace the template with the render function.

Directives:
Vue.js has few built-in directives such as “v-if, v-else, v-show, v-on, v-bind, and v-model” which are used to perform various actions in the frontend.

Watchers:
Watchers in Vue.js are applied to data upon changes. For example, form input elements. Here, we don’t need to add any additional events. Watcher will take care of handling any data changes. This making the code simple and fast.

Routing:
In Vue.js avigation between pages is performed with the help of “vue-router”.

Lightweight:
Vue.js script is very lightweight and the performance is very fast.

Vue-CLI:
Vue.js can be installed via command line using the “vue-cli” command line interface. It helps to build and compile the project easily using vue-cli.