Game of Codes

What if front-end frameworks were countries?

"Over the years, observing the world of technology, I could not help but feel that it is a great material for creating a separate universe that could become the basis for an extremely interesting story.

Using real data, such as the number of NPM downloads, stars on github or website traffic, I tried to measure the "power" of a given technology and visualize it with quasi-historical maps."

Follow me:
Newsletter

Fierce combat, unexpected twists, legendary heroes and fanatical communities - see the insane world of JavaScript frameworks.

Methodology

The methodology used is simple - the size of a given country depends on the number of NPM downloads, and the area is calculated based on the percentage of total downloads..

I used data from the last 12 months. That is:

Name Downloads Percentage
React 508,399,697 53%
Vue 202,590,868 21%
Angular 122,890,228 13%
jQuery 115,459,780 12%
Svelte 7,227,904 1%

(The numbers have been rounded)

Status and names

In naming, I adopted a simple rule - React is an empire because it "conquered" the largest part of the market and swallowed many other front-end "kingdoms".

Vue, Angular, and jQuery are kingdoms because they are of similar power and size.

Svelte, as the smallest of all, has merely the status of a duchy.

History

The full potential of the front-end story reveals itself when we look back a few years.

The landscape was much more diverse in 2015, and the technological "continent" was more divided.

When I look at this map from 2015, I immediately see numerous dramas, successes, failures and unexpected twists in the lives of our "characters" in this fascinating front-end story.

The dominant technology back then was jQuery, and React was just one of many kingdoms. Then Ember and Backbone had a strong position, which will later be "eaten" by the neighboring powers.

And Vue was then only a small, meaningless principality, and no one expected what power it would grow to.

An interesting situation is for the kingdom of Angular, which has lasted unchanged for years. Numerous turmoil did not affect its position too much, but it also never made a significant expansion himself.

About me

Hi!

My name is Michał and apart from being a web developer and professional dancer (yes, that's true - see my video 😂) I am also a huge fan of history, maps and fantasy.

Over the years, observing the world of technologies, I could not help but feel that it is a great material for creating a separate universe that could become the basis for an extremely interesting story.

This project is purely for fun. Using real data, such as the number of NPM downloads, stars on github or website traffic, I tried to measure the "power" of a given technology and visualize it with quasi-historical maps.

I was also tempted to write a mini-story that could happen in such an imaginary universe.

Anyway - if you're curious about what front-end technologies visualized as states would look like, read on.

And if you have any idea how this story and this universe could become more interesting, or more in line with real statistics related to the front-end - let me know in the comment!

Give feedback and ideas Find me on Twitter

See also