Web technologies are multiplying rapidly, with new tools popping up every year, giving sideways to the old ones. It can be challenging for businesses and developers to keep up with the many front-end technologies available out there. Selecting the right tool is crucial to building the next-generation business solutions. Getting to know the tools of the business can make your job easier by helping you maximise your efficiency, add value to your existing business process and at the same time don’t burn a hole in your pocket.
In this article, we bring you a curated list of 10-must-have front end tools to accelerate web development.
Are you ready to unveil the front-end technologies tools list? Here we go.
10 Must-Have Front-End Tools to Build Next-Gen Websites
- Vue.js
Vue.js is a JavaScript library for developing distinct web interfaces and single-page applications. It aims to provide the benefits of reactive data binding and composable view components with an API that is as simple as possible.
This front-end tool works as an independent tool that creates web interfaces without requiring an additional extension. Vue.js is one of the most popular front end technologies amongst developers, and its popularity keeps increasing day-by-day owing to its capability of powering Single Page Applications when you merge it with other tools and libraries.
- Npm
Npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. It was created in 2009 as an open-source project to help JavaScript developers easily share packaged modules of code.
The npm Registry is a public collection of packages of open-source code for Node.js, front-end web apps, mobile apps, robots, routers, and countless other needs of the JavaScript community.npm is the command-line client that allows developers to install and publish those packages
Features:
- Discover and reuse over 470,000 free code packages in the Registry
- Encourage code discovery and reuse within teams
- Publish and control access to a namespace
- Manage public and private code using the same workflow
- Ionic 4
Ionic is an open-source mobile UI toolkit for building high quality, cross-platform native and web app experiences. It is most widely used for building Hybrid Mobile Applications. Consisting of three main components, (a Sass-based UI framework, an Angular framework, and a compiler), this tool helps you deliver consistent experiences across all channels, with a single codebase and customisable design system that works everywhere.
The sass-based UI framework is optimised explicitly for mobile UIs. By using this tool, you can empower your existing web developers, create without limits and allow you to be a part of a vibrant community of more than 5M developers in over 200 countries.
- AngularJS
AngularJS is another must-have tool for front-end developers. It is an open-source web application framework which helps to extend the HTML syntax for web applications. It simplifies the front-end development process by developing an accessible, readable and expressive environment. It enjoys more than 1500+ contributors on GitHub and is maintained by Google.
Features:
- It is an is open source, completely free, and used by thousands of developers around the world
- It offers RICH Internet Application.
- It provides an option to write a client-side application using JavaScript using MVC
- It automatically handles JavaScript code suitable for each browse
- Chrome DevTools
The Chrome Developer Tools are a set of debugging tools built directly into Chrome Browser. These tools allow developers to do wide varieties of testing, which can expedite the development and debugging processes. It can make investigating simple by demonstrating to you the blunders in your code straightforwardly. This tool can also help you to inspect pages and their components on the fly without having to go back to the IDE.
Features:
- It allows adding custom CSS rules
- Users can view Margin, Border, and Padding
- It helps to Emulate Mobile Devices
- User can easily disable the browser’s caching when dev tool is open
- HTML5 Boilerplate
HTML5 Boilerplate helps in building fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. It is a set of files that developers can download, which provide a foundation for any website. It can help you kickstart your project with the combined knowledge and effort of 100s of developers, all in one little package.
Features:
- It allows developers to use HTML5 elements
- Apache Server Configs to improve performance and security
- It offers an optimised version of the Google Universal Analytics snippet
- Protection against console statements causing JavaScript errors in older browsers
- Extensive inline and accompanying documentation
- GitHub
GitHub is a web development platform inspired by the way you work. This tool allows developers to review and analyse code, make programming applications, manage projects, and build software.
Features:
- Coordinate easily, stay aligned, and get done with GitHub’s project management tools
- Easy documentation alongside quality coding
- Allows all code in a single place
- Developers can host their documentation directly from repositories
- Grunt
Grunt is a famous task runner on NodeJS. It is flexible and widely adopted. It is a preferred tool when it comes to task automation. Grunt allows automation of many day-to-day tasks such as minification, unit testing, and compiling. It offers lots of bundled plugins for everyday tasks. It can perform the vast majority of the dreary work, for example, minification, gathering, Unit testing, and so on. The most notable benefit of using Grunt over other tools is that it consists of a large number of plugins that are pre-configured.
Features:
- It makes the workflow as easy as writing a setup file
- It allows automating repetitive tasks with minimum effort
- It includes functions in JS and config in JSON
- Grunt has built-in tasks for extending the functionality of plugins and scripts.
- It expedites the development process and increases the performance of projects
- The ecosystem of Grunt is vast; so it is possible to automate anything with significantly less effort
- CodeKit
Codekit is a front-end web development tool that can save front-end developers a lot of time when deploying their applications. It provides support to build websites faster. The tool combines, minifies and syntax-checks JavaScript and also optimises images. Cache busting is another feature of this tool that makes your changes effective immediately.
Features:
- CSS changes are injected without the need of reloading the entire page
- Combine scripts to reduce HTTP requests.
- Minify code to reduce file sizes
- Works automatically with most languages without trouble
Summing Up
Front-end development tools are essential for creating a vigorous and responsive web application. In this article, we looked at many types of tools that can be used throughout the development process. The next step is implementation. How do you implement and tap into the full potential of these tools? The best option is to hire a front end developer who knows these tools inside out and can leverage them to its maximum by compiling comprehensive front-end solutions to add interactivity and human-friendly gestures to your websites and applications.
