Agree with niix - Been working with AngularJS for the last 9 months and I like it a lot - I like the "MVC" ish style; theres a ton of 3rd party directives, samples, tutorials, etc...

I don't like that AngularJS 2 is almost a complete re-write - i think it's going to severely fragment the community - it really should be called something else (this is only from what I read about it - haven't tried it myself)

In the last couple weeks I've been playing with React and I really don't care for the whole html mixed into the js thing - looks sloppy (IMO).

Try them out, see what you like and go from there.

Is it Angular really any different with the way it includes logic in templates? At least in React they're grouped together.

I've found that React isn't comparable to larger frameworks like Angular and Ember. While the latter two provide a sort of "batteries included" solution, React is simply "just the ui".

There are many articles on the Internet debating the frameworks, so I don't see any reason to go into much detail about that in particular. But what I recommend is giving them all a try and finding what works best for you. After all productivity and thereafter maintainability is really what is most important when building a product.

I am a back end dev, who gets to dabble in JavaScript every so often, but never enough to consider myself an expert in any way.

I have tried Angular and there are way to many concepts for the amount of time I get to spend on it. React (after three days) is refreshingly simple. Well so far.....

React by itself isn't comparable to Angular or Ember, but combine it with a flux implementation of your choosing and you have a pretty solid base for a declarative style of application. I've been using it now for just over a year, and it feels like I should have been building applications like this all along.

I've been saying the same of PHP since I got into AngularJS - It can't do everything and some backend processes are still required to run in a real backend language, but man, the quality / utility / coolness you can produce with the latest JS frameworks is awesome!

How did you go about choosing a flux implementation?