What is a JavaScript framework?

In the last section, we were reviewing all concerns about JavaScript and how we can organize our packages using NPM and Yarn. Now, it's time to review some tools that will improve our development experience; it's time to talk about frameworks.

A framework can be described as a group of tools and methodologies organized to solve common problems in the project development. Those solutions are generic; each one was tested in different environments and allows you to reuse that functionality to save time and cost.

So, based on the previous explanation, we can define a JavaScript framework as a collection of components and libraries (in most cases, interdependent) to fill the needs of the application in browser clients. What are these needs? Let's check some of the most generic ones:

• Routing
• Data sending features and retrieval (XMLHttpRequest)
• Correct DOM management
• Managing and organizing your code in separated functionality
• Defining standard data flows for the application
• Defining lifecycle for some functionality