In this ever-changing landscape of technology, SharePoint stands as an ally to organizations with a need for document management, real-time collaboration among a team, customizing a site, extensibility and a couple more of interesting features which would be of interest to your business or organization.
Born in the early years of 21st century, SharePoint has had a significant growth and development to support multifaceted platform bridging the gap of traditional boundaries to embracing cloud technologies thereby empowering business and how they operate in this almost full-blown digital era.
Well in this article we dive deep into a comparison between SharePoint Framework(SPFx) and PnPjs. Ready for the dive?
Now that you are equipped it's only fair to let you know that both SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and PnPjs (Patterns and Practices JavaScript Core Library) are a powerful set of tools in the SharePoint ecosystem with each serving it's own distinct purpose which we will figure out as we move with the depth of this topic.
SharePoint Framework (SPFx) as the name suggest is a framework that supports modern web technologies be it React, Vue or Angular, your favorite development environment that is Linux, Microsoft or Mac and your prefered choice of IDE which am guessing for most people will be Vs Code to enable building of experiences and mobile ready solutions. That's a relief right? I mean the war between JavaScript frameworks is over and the shade of switching between different development environments is handled so you can comfortably continue performing miracles on your environment! Take away key points from SPFx:
- Support for Modern Web Technologies.
- Development Environment Flexibility.
- IDE Independence.
- Relief from Framework Wars.
- Comfortable Development Environment.
PnPjs is a JavaScript library primarily focused on providing an API for working with SharePoint REST APIs. It's main functionality is abstracting most of the work developers should do making it easy to interact with SharePoint data from your client-side code.
Yeah, the deeper we dive the darker it gets and that's why am here to simplify this for you. So basically, SPFx and PnPjs make a dynamic duo. Where SPFx sparks creativity through use of web-parts and pages and it is used in the front facing part(Frontend) to craft responsive and feature-rich components which are displayed to a person while PnPjs provides a dependable foundation or rather is more backend-related(Logic users don't see) for fetching, updating and managing data for a successful exploration into the world of SharePoint and it's a reliable side-kick much like Scooby-Doo's loyal companion, Shaggy or Tinker Bell to Peter Pan. Get it now?
Apart from SPFx being a Frontend facing experience and PnPjs being the backend logic, another interesting difference between this two is that SPFx uses component based approach to create independent web parts or extensions that can be added to SharePoint pages while PnPjs doesn't dictate a specific structure for your project but can be used within SPFx projects or any other JavaScript project.
In a nutshell, SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and PnPjs play different but complementary roles in the realm of SharePoint development. SPFx acts as a robust development framework tailored for crafting modern and engaging SharePoint experiences. On the flip side, PnPjs steps in as a handy utility library with a laser focus on making interactions with SharePoint APIs a breeze. When it comes to your project, the choice between the two—or even a harmonious combination—depends entirely on the unique requirements you're aiming to fulfill.
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