While the famous trio in JavaScript platforms (Ember.js, Angular.js and React.js) are lining up new releases, there is a new challenger on the block. While it is still early, Aurelia is, in my honest opinion, promising. The framework is the latest from the stable of Durandal Inc., the group that also created DurandalJS.

Aurelia is written to work with simple conventions that help you save time by not having to write a ton of configuration code. In addition, it also doesn’t require writing a lot of boilerplate code to get you up and running. It is written to the ES2016 specifications, and hence incorporates a bunch of modern conventions provided in the standard. It also has robust routing capabilities and supports dynamic routes, child routers and asynchronous screen activation patterns. Not only that, it also supports extending your HTML. You can create custom HTML elements and control the template generation process.

Setting up Aurelia is easy. First you need to set up Gulp for build automation. Using your Node console, run the npm install –g gulp command to install Gulp. You also need to install the browser package manager jspm  using npm. Now to setup Aurelia, you can either use Yeoman  to generate a bare bones Aurelia project in your target folder using the command yo generator-aurelia or alternatively, download the Aurelia skeleton navigation project  and extract the contents to your target folder. Now navigate to the folder in your Node console and then run npm install command to configure the dependencies and the jspm install –ycommand to install the Aurelia library and bootstrap.

You are all set! Aurelia demonstrates pretty amazing levels of browser compatibility and works well in all modern browsers. Not only that, you are not bound by ES7 specification. You can program pretty much in ES5, ES6, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, and the list goes on.