Everyone knows them: Bootstrap, Material, and many, many others. We’re talking about UI frameworks for web frontends. They’re both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because they take a lot of work off our shoulders as developers. A curse, because these frameworks make it even more difficult to stand out from the crowd. But which frameworks can we fall back on? How do they influence our application’s architecture, and do all our applications really have to be so similar?

I must admit, I have mixed feelings about UI frameworks. On the one hand, I wouldn’t want to do without them, especially when it comes to the rapid development of a standard frontend. But on the other hand, you should know that you’ll need to engage with the framework. At its core, a framework like Bootstrap provides a set of components that developers can use to create an application’s graphical interface. Individual components such as buttons or tables don’t stand on their own. They are included in larger structures like dialog elements or a responsive grid system. Some UI frameworks even come with their own styling concept that provides better integration of custom styles, making customization easier. The bottom line is that in most cases, an application will not just have a Bootstrap button, but is a Bootstrap application as a whole.

What frameworks are there anyway?

Bootstrap is undisputedly the current number one UI framework. However, the competition doesn’t sleep. There will never be a complete list of all popular UI frameworks, and any list is always shaped by personal preferences and experiences. Because of this, I won’t attempt to create another list, but will simply provide a small glimpse into the world of frameworks and their evolving dynamics. **Figure 1 **shows the evolution of some UI frameworks over the last two years.

Fig. 1: A selection of UI frameworks (Source: npmtrends.com)

The graph shows the number of downloads on npmjs.com over the past two years. This number is just one indicator of many and should not be your only criteria when choosing a framework or library. Nevertheless, you can draw conclusions about a package’s global usage from the number of downloads. Another metric to measure a solution’s popularity in the community is the number of stars a project has on GitHub. Bootstrap is clearly ahead here too. With 150,000 stars, it has nearly double the amount of Antd - which has just over 72,000. In that respect, the recent rise of Tailwind CSS is particularly interesting. This marks a small turning point in how frontends are built. While frameworks like Bootstrap or Material UI follow a component-based approach, Tailwind is a utility-first CSS ...