What is Svelte? And How it Impacts JavaScript

Over the years, JavaScript development has gone through several paradigms: from raw AJAX in vanilla JS to a long reign of event-driven frameworks such as jQuery and Mootools, to the current state-driven approach of the current champions such as React, Vue, and Angular. 

But in an era where everyone is looking at performance, accessibility, and developer experience, there’s a new contender that promises to deliver all of these through a radical new approach to building apps. Is Svelte the next big thing in JavaScript frameworks? 

The Evolution of JavaScript Frameworks

In one way or another, we’ve been building web apps even before the word “app” was coined.

Early interactive websites gathered the power of AJAX to provide improved navigation and even what we may call the first SPAs. But the crude state of JS made for an excruciating developer experience, making apps increasingly hard to deploy and maintain as they grew.

In 2006 John Resig created jQuery, and the era of event-driven frameworks was born. After a quick challenge with MooTools, jQuery rose as the go-to framework for anything front-end, and it reigned supreme for a good decade. 

But as applications grew bigger and more complex, the need to share data across components drove a paradigm shift towards other approaches. After a brief and quick burn of Ember and AngularJS, we ended up with the current champions, that in one way or another aim towards a declarative, state-driven approach to frontend development: React, Vue and Angular. 

React is currently the most used and one of the most sought-after skills in all of tech, which provides an incredibly rich environment, a ginormous user base, and pretty much a guaranteed job for anyone that learns the ins and outs of the library.