The JavaScript world seems to be entering a crisis of churn rate. Frameworks and technologies are being pushed out and burned through at an unsustainable speed. But I think the community will adapt and adopt new practices in response. Developers will move, I believe, from monolithic frameworks like Angular.js and Ember to a ‘pick n mix’ of small, dedicated libraries to mitigate the risk of churn and to allow solutions to different concerns to compete separately.
Obviously, this post has big red ‘opinion’ stickers over it. But hear me out.
Quite resonates with my post “The franticness of working in the web business” (dd June 2013):
Be prepared to un-learn what you know every 6 months
The article then goes further suggesting to cherry-pick your needed components:
By using small libraries – components with a dedicated purpose and a small surface area – it becomes possible to pick and mix, to swap parts of our front end stack out if and when they are superceded [sic].
Take jQuery for example. You can use it, or – alternatively – go a long way by mix-n-matching VanillaJS, qwery, bonzo, bean, reqwest, … where you need them. If you don’t like one or the other, just swap ‘m out.