Benefits of Using a UI Framework in Enterprise Applications

Today’s modern apps must have a clean, attractive, and responsive UI (user interface) that facilitates interaction between the users and the app. In essence, a good, consistent and user-friendly UI enhances user experience and helps attract users. However, designing the UI of large business applications can be challenging. That’s because large enterprise-grade applications often require a complex UI with numerous elements/components. And creating all these components from scratch is not only time-consuming, but it can be difficult to achieve consistency in design and ensure responsiveness and ease of use. That’s where UI frameworks come in handy. These frameworks enable developers to build stunning, interactive and functional UIs faster. As a result, JavaScript UI frameworks have gained significant popularity in the past decade.

This article will provide a thorough understanding of Javascript UI frameworks and their benefits for large business applications. We’ll also explore features of Ext JS, the best UI framework for building high-performance large enterprise-grade apps.

What Are UI Frameworks – An Overview

A UI framework is a collection of pre-built and ready-to-use UI components and code libraries that developers can use to quickly build interactive and responsive UIs (user interfaces). These reusable components include buttons, forms, drop-down menus, calendars, carousels, sliders, tables, grids, etc. As a result, UI component libraries and frameworks speed up the app development process as developers don’t have to create common UI components for their apps from scratch. Moreover, these frameworks help create a consistent design across the app.

Today, numerous UI libraries and frameworks are available in the market. Some of the most popular UI frameworks include Ext JS, React, and Angular. Ext JS comes with a wide range of pre-built UI components, including a blazing-fast data grid, for building highly functional UIs for enterprise-grade apps. React UI framework and Angular utilize component-based architecture, enabling developers to create stunning UIs and reuse components.

There are also several Angular and React UI libraries offering a wide range of ready-to-use UI components. Examples of best React UI frameworks include Material UI, Semantic UI React, and Material Design.

Why Do We Need a UI Framework?

A UI library or framework helps front-end developers in several ways:

Rapid Development

Since a UI framework comes with pre-built and tested UI components and pre-written code libraries, developers can instantly use them in their apps. As a result, they don’t have to write long lines of code for every component from scratch. Thus, a UI framework accelerates the front-end development process and saves time. Moreover, a good UI framework is customizable, allowing you to customize the components with just a few lines of code to match your website or web app’s overall theme and design. Less code also means less maintenance.

Consistent Design and User Experience

A good UI framework provides a wide range of professionally styled UI components with a consistent design, enabling developers to build beautiful UIs and ensure a consistent UI design across the app. Hence, these frameworks help enhance user experience.

Responsive Design

A reliable UI framework like Ext JS offers responsive UI components that automatically adapt to various screen sizes and devices, such as smartphones, desktops, laptops and tablets. A responsive UI design is crucial for enhancing the user experience.

Support and Community

A popular UI framework has a massive community of developers using the framework. This means you can get expert advice, find answers and solutions to all your problems related to the framework, and access a huge collection of learning resources. A good framework also offers exceptional customer support to guide you through the integration process or anything related to the framework.

Also Read: How to Design UI Faster

What are the Benefits Of Using UI Frameworks in Enterprise Applications?

It’s Usually a Safer Choice

A secure UI framework provides pre-tested UI components and offers various built-in security features, enabling developers to build highly secure apps and prevent cyber attacks.

However, there are several reports regarding security breaches associated with open-source UI frameworks. In fact, according to the Sonatype “DevSecOps Community Survey” 2019, open-source security breaches have increased by 71%. Common security risks associated with these frameworks include Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). As a result, many executives avoid enforcing these frameworks in their organizations and prefer a highly-secure proprietary JavaScript framework like Ext JS.

Download Whitepaper: Proprietary vs. Open-Source JavaScript UI Framework

More Efficient

By offering ready-to-use, tested, and high-performance UI components, UI frameworks enable developers to build more efficient UIs faster. Moreover, since developers don’t have to write code again and again for common UI elements, they can focus on other crucial development tasks. Hence, these frameworks improve developer productivity. Additionally, a framework like Ext JS provides additional ways to improve efficiency. For instance, it allows you to implement the MVVM architectural design system in your web app, which helps with app maintenance and scalability.

Less Expensive

UI frameworks are a cost-effective way to quickly build responsive, appealing, and feature-rich user interfaces. These frameworks significantly reduce development costs and time with their pre-built components, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, and security features.

Facilitates the Management of Larger Programs

A good UI JavaScript library is designed to handle large business apps efficiently. For instance, the Ext JS framework has a high-performance JS grid that loads quickly and can handle millions of records without affecting the app’s performance.

Cross-Browser Friendly

Different users will access your website or web app from different browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Edge. Hence, building UI components that work on all these browsers is essential. However, when you create UI components from scratch, ensuring that your app works smoothly on all major browsers can be challenging.

Thankfully, an efficient UI framework, such as Ext JS, provides high-performance UI components that are designed and tested to work on all major browsers. As a result, you can create highly-functional UIs for various browsers without writing long lines of code.

Which is the Best UI Framework for Creating Enterprise-Grade Apps?

Ext JS is a leading enterprise solution/JavaScript UI framework that enables developers to build highly functional and highly secure modern web and mobile apps with stunning UIs. The powerful front-end development framework offers a range of impressive features and tools to facilitate the creation of data-rich, cross-platform apps. Ext JS is trusted by over 200,000+ developers and 60% of Fortune 100 companies, including Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and Cisco.

Reasons to Choose Ext JS UI Framework

Here are the key reasons why thousands of developers and well-known enterprises trust Ext JS for their front-end development needs:

Faster Development

Ext JS offers 140+ responsive and high-performance pre-built UI components that facilitate the rapid development of top-notch and complex UIs. The components are beautifully styled, but you can also customize them to match your app’s theme and style without writing lengthy code. Moreover, all the high-quality work together seamlessly in an app, delivering an outstanding user experience.

Some of the common UI components include:

• Buttons
• Progress bars
• Icons
• Menus
• Gauges
• Text fields
• Forms
• Sliders
• Tabs
• Carousels
• Popups
• Checkboxes
• HTML Calendar
• Grid

Impressive Features to Create Data-Intensive Apps

Enterprise-level apps often need data grids and visualizations to organize a large amount of data and display and visualize it efficiently. Ext JS offers the fastest JS data grid you’ll find in a UI framework. The high-performance grid processes the data quickly and can handle millions of records efficiently without compromising performance. The grid is also pre-tested on a wide range of browsers and platforms.

Some of the main features and capabilities of the grid include:

• Filtering
• Grouping
• Sorting
• Scrolling
• Row expansion
• Drag-and-drop
• Data export (supports various formats, such as CSV, XLS, HTML, and PDF.)

Ext JS also supports a wide variety of high-performance and beautiful charts and D3 visualizations that you can easily add to your web apps.

Cross-Browser and Cross-Platform Compatibility

Many JavaScript frameworks come with limited features for desktop application development. Ext JS, on the other hand, provides a single codebase for efficient cross-platform app development. Hence, it allows you to deliver a seamless user experience across desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Moreover, Ext JS is cross-browser-compatible and supports all major browsers. All of its components are designed and tested across browsers.

Highly Secure

One of the primary motivators for enterprises to choose Ext JS over open-source UI frameworks is security. With open-source frameworks, anyone can access and study the source code, and you have limited control over the source contributions. However, enterprise solutions and apps consist of sensitive data. Hence, enterprises need to control user authorization and accessibility to the system. With a highly secure proprietary framework like Ext JS, you can regulate and authorize access to the source code. Moreover, all the components of Ext JS are highly secure and tested, so you can be sure there is no malware embedded in the code.

Cost-Effective

An open-source UI framework seems to be a better option than a proprietry framework like Ext JS in terms of cost and pricing. However, it usually ends up costing you more in the long run when you take into account maintenance costs, performance issues, and security breaches. In other words, you can save money on maintenance and security using Ext JS. In fact, many enterprises and developers have saved a notable amount of money on front-end web development with Ext JS.

Take, for example, a study conducted by Dimensional Research that shows Ext JS users have saved:

• 50% on front-end development
• 75% on annual app maintenance
• 75% on cross-platform and cross-browser development

Read the full analysis of customer ROI here.

Extensive Documentation and Learning Resources

Ext JS comes with detailed documentation that provides all the details and information about the framework’s functionality, features, and capabilities. It also has several coding examples to help you get started quickly. Additionally, Sencha has an impressive Resource Center consisting of numerous supporting videos, webinars, whitepapers, and ebooks.

Conclusion

Developing UI components of a large business application from scratch and ensuring design consistency and ease of use can be time-consuming and quite challenging. However, with UI frameworks, developers can easily build complex yet user-friendly interfaces faster. UI frameworks provide pre-written code libraries and ready-to-use UI components, making it easier to create exceptional user interfaces quickly. These frameworks offer high-quality, responsive components that work seamlessly on various browsers and platforms. When choosing a UI framework, consider your project requirements, the framework‘s performance, learning curve and features, such as the ability to integrate with existing projects, design consistency, and loading time.

Ext JS UI framework is a popular choice among thousands of developers and Fortune 100 companies, such as Apple, Cisco, Samsung and Microsoft, due to its impressive features, such as:

• 140+ fully-tested and highly customizable pre-built UI components
• Blazing-fast data grid
• A wide range of charts and D3 visualizations
• Highly secure framework
• Cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility
• Benefits like cost savings and faster development
• MVVM architecture
• Extensive documentation and additional learning resources
• Exceptional customer support

Try The Best and Most Secure JavaScript UI Framework for Free!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is JavaScript a UI framework?

JavaScript is a scripting language that enables developers to add interactive UI elements to their websites and web apps. However, today a wide range of JavaScript UI frameworks are available, such as Ext JS, React and Angular.

Why should I use a UI framework?

UI frameworks offer various benefits, such as rapid development, design consistency, responsive components, cross-browser compatibility, and access to a huge community of developers using the same framework.

What is the most used UI framework?

Ext JS is one of the most popular UI frameworks used by thousands of enterprises worldwide. React is another widely used JS framework.

What is Ext JS framework?

Ext JS is a leading front-end JavaScript framework that offers over 140 pre-built UI components. Other prominent features of the framework include a blazing-fast JS grid, security features, cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility and extensive documentation.

Which UI framework is the fastest and most secure for web development?

Ext JS is the most secure JavaScript framework for building data-rich enterprise-grade apps. It offers a wide range of ready-to-use UI components that facilitate the rapid development of exceptional UIs.