One of the watershed moments in the story of the TypeScript language came when it was announced that the Microsoft and Google teams had been working together on Angular 2. Angular 2 was a much anticipated update to the popular Angular (or Angular 1) framework. Unfortunately, this update required a new set of language features in order to make the Angular 2 syntax cleaner and easier to understand. Originally, Google had proposed a new language named AtScript to facilitate these new language features, which were also closely aligned with the ECMAScript 6 and 7 proposals.

After several months of collaboration, it was announced that all of the necessary features of the AtScript language would be absorbed into the TypeScript language, and that Angular 2 would be written in TypeScript. This meant that the providers of new language features (TypeScript and Microsoft) and the consumers of the new language features (Angular 2 and Google) were able to agree on the requirements and immediate future of the language. This collaboration shows that the TypeScript language has had intense scrutiny from a well-renowned JavaScript framework team, and has passed with flying colors.

Angular 2, however, was not the first framework to adopt the TypeScript language, and many third-party JavaScript libraries also offer full support for TypeScript.

In this chapter, we will take a look at some of these more popular JavaScript frameworks that have full TypeScript language integration. We will compare the syntax used in each of these frameworks, by building the same sample MVC application using each framework. In doing so, we will have a side-by-side comparison that will show us how each of these frameworks has tackled the same design problems. Before we begin though, we will start with a general discussion on what an MVC framework is, and how it can help us in our development experience.

We will cover the following topics:

• What is an MVC framework?
• The benefits of using an MVC framework
• An outline of our sample application
• Using Backbone
• Using Aurelia
• Using Angular 2
• Using ReactJs
• Rendering performance analysis