A trending project

Evan You started working on the first prototype of Vue in 2013, while working at Google, using Angular. The initial goal was to have all the cool features of Angular, such as data binding and data-driven DOM, but without the extra concepts that make this framework opinionated and heavy to learn and use.

The first public release was published on February 2014 and had immediate success the very first day, with HackerNews frontpage, /r/javascript at the top spot and 10k unique visits on the official website.

The first major version 1.0 was reached in October 2015, and by the end of that year, the npm downloads rocketed to 382k ytd, the GitHub repository received 11k stars, the official website had 363k unique visitors, and the popular PHP framework Laravel had picked Vue as its official frontend library instead of React.

The second major version, 2.0, was released in September 2016, with a new virtual DOM-based renderer and many new features such as server-side rendering and performance improvements. This is the version we will use in this book. It is now one of the fastest frontend libraries, outperforming even React according to a comparison refined with the React team (https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison). At the time of writing this book, Vue was the second most popular frontend library on GitHub with 72k stars, just behind React and ahead of Angular 1 (https://github.com/showcases/front-end-javascript-frameworks).

The next evolution of the library on the roadmap includes more integration with Vue-native libraries such as Weex and NativeScript to create native mobile apps with Vue, plus new features and improvements.

Today, Vue is used by many companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, Alibaba, Baidu, Xiaomi, Expedia, Nintendo, and GitLab.