The Best Tools For a Front-End Developer

In recent years, one of the most popular careers in the technology sector is web programming, especially everything related to the visual and interactive part of a website. Be aware that behind this aspect of the website are front-end developers. If you want to become a front-end developer, here are some important tools and concepts to know.  

Basic tools

HTML

HTML, an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, is the standard markup language of the web that provides the structure of a web page, using blocks of elements represented by tags, which contain the content seen by the user when he visits the website.  

CSS  

When the site is made on an HTML basis, you have to give it styles and make it look amazing. That’s when we have to use CSS (cascading style sheets), a language that describes how the elements we create should be displayed.

JavaScript  

When the website is only HTML and CSS, the user can see it, but it will be very static and the experience could be boring. To solve this problem, it is essential to learn how to use the JavaScript programming language, which is currently the most used to add interactivity to the site.  

Other very useful tools

Git  

Git is a version control system that allows you to track project changes and files to see what status they are in, to compare changes, to be able to restore them and to allow them. So we can work in sync with our development team because Git lets you know what’s changed by who in each of the project files.  

NPM (Node Package Manager)  

In some cases, to make it easier to run on a website, we may use JavaScript libraries or external resources. With NPM, we can install and update CSS and JavaScript files with popular commands that run directly in the console: NPM or YARN.  

CSS preprocessors  

When using CSS regularly, we notice that there are some parts of the language syntax that become quite repetitive. It becomes interesting to learn how to use a preprocessor that will help us improve our productivity. Here are the most common preprocessors from which we can choose the one that suits us best: Stylus, Sass, Less, PostCSS.  

CSS Framework  

There are cases where we want to go much faster, like when we are asked to create a page at the last minute. CSS frameworks (or development environments), which are very fast tools, are the best solution. They have many predefined options like “copy and paste”. The two most used frameworks are Bootstrap and Foundation.  

Webpack

Webpack is a grouping system that allows us to create the optimized production version of our files so that they can be read by the browser, through loaders and configurations that we have to define in a special file at the base of our project.   

In this way, we will know that we will always have the production version of our project in a folder dedicated to it, optimizing our development process. The most popular frameworks or libraries are React, Angular and Vue.  

React

React is the most popular JavaScript library at the moment. It was created by the Facebook team and optimized to create user interfaces with a component-based architecture, with optimal management of data flow and events. It allows you to create views in a web application, in addition to having a virtual DOM that makes application performance very high.   

It does not update our entire site when there are changes in the data, it only makes the nodes that change based on the interaction that the user performs.  

Angular

Angular is a JavaScript framework created and managed by Google whose objective is to develop object-oriented web applications in which the loading of data and calls to the server are made dynamically and asynchronously while offering it a very high performance.  

Vue  

Vue is a progressive framework, which means that it is modulated and we can choose the libraries we wish to use, depending on the complexity of the project we are doing, which optimizes its performance, facilitates scalability and in fact an excellent option for a small as well as for a very large and complex project.   

One of the most interesting things about Vue is its way of creating components since it includes HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the same component file, but in separate pieces that will eventually compose the tree of the elements that will form our application.  

Now that you know our tools

After learning all the basic concepts of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and choosing the framework in which you want to focus, you can move on to more advanced concepts such as automated testing and server-side rendering.   

The more experience you have, the more skilled you will be. You will be ready to take on any challenge that a professional or personal project can bring you.   You are not an expert in web development? Contact us now, our team can help: click at FutureOn to view our digital services!