How to Choose the Right Front-end Technologies for Your Next Project?

Learning the skills needed to do front-end development (like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to be precise) is quite hard and time-consuming. There is no use in straddling the fence; it requires a lot of in-depth knowledge about markup, styling, scripting, and browser compatibility.
However, following those long-time-evaluated best practices may seem tedious at first, but there are several advantages that you should be aware of when making your choice.
Hence, in this article, I will discuss the choices that are available with regard to front-end development services for your next project or app development. Choosing the right option for your needs is critical because if you choose the wrong one, it can cause serious trouble to deliver anything on time, viz., not ideal at all.
So, let’s go through a few points which will help you make your final decision. Starting with the most commonly used – JavaScript and CSS.
JavaScript Frameworks and CSS Pre-Processors
JavaScript framework helps to manage the large scope and complexity of modern-day applications, websites, and web pages. At the same time, CSS pre-processors take care to make developers’ lives easier. That indicates freeing them from writing verbose repetitive CSS code that deals with browser inconsistencies and bugs.
CSS pre-processor tools like Bootstrap and Bootstrap frameworks like Foundation are aimed at solving problems. Bootstrap allows web designers and software developers to focus on solving problems creatively instead of wrestling with minor front-end issues for hours or days (months in some cases).
However, it cannot provide solutions to all the problems that programmers might face from time to time.
These Frameworks sense how a complete website should function conceptually, solve problems automatically and then just do the heavy lifting for you. These frameworks are more about intuitive design rather than individual components front-end files that you upload one by one as bootstrap does.
Now let’s talk about three more front-end development services – TypeScript, React, and Angular.
TypeScript, React, and Angular
One of the most popular frameworks in JavaScript is Angular. Angular is an open-source framework built-in TypeScript and used extensively to create client applications with MVC architecture, where model interaction data updates automatically through a watcher.
React is another extremely popular library for JavaScript that has been backed by Facebook for instant-rendering interfaces. React’s main goal is also to be “anti-fragile,” meaning that it should break before you have to, good enough from a user perspective, and economical to develop responsive applications.
Angular Framework uses TypeScript and makes use of custom tags called directives, which hide away much of the functional markup from the developer’s view and provides type safety by converting HTML tags into real programming counterparts which compile your scope models into strings for UI rendering.
Oftentimes tutorials and guides are written without these details included; as a result, new users may end up having an accumulation of days or weeks’ worth of learning resources that may or may not be accurately detailed in regard to the game.
Important Factors to Consider While Selecting a Front-end Technology
They are some criteria that you might want to consider while making a decision on what front-end technology is best for you.
Yesterday’s web applications were mostly simple, usually with just a few dynamic data sets to manage. Consequently, developers back then typically chose CMS platforms like WordPress for content management, Python or PHP for back-end development, and jQuery and JavaScript for front-end programming.
But nowadays, web and mobile applications have new levels of complexity; they may have dozens of dynamic data sets to manage or be interacted with in different ways by different users. Consequently, developers today will probably choose new technology stacks like Node.js/MongoDB at the back-end. React can be used in the middle tier as an application framework utilizing Redux for state management, and “Light” JS frameworks such as Vue.js or Angular can be used in the front tier serving user interfaces on a legacy stack.
Before we discuss how to choose the right workflow technologies, it is worth spending some time talking about the rationale behind choosing a particular technology; if you are thinking about starting with a new technology, then you need to carefully consider your needs and assess front-end development features and whether the workflow tools available are suitable for achieving them. There are some key considerations that should be taken into account when choosing a workflow tool:
- Who is using it?
- What data types is it designed to handle?
- How big will the data be?
- How much will computing power be required?
- What are its capabilities?
Front-end development has become an essential skill for content developers around the globe, and that’s not hard to understand. With more and more websites having interfaces, new web applications exposing workflows, and designers creating a user experience (UI) flow, knowledge of front-end development skills are quickly becoming a requirement rather than a desirable skill set.