First, think about apps like Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram. They work perfectly, continuously providing their users with a complete, impeccable experience. It’s exactly frontend technologies that are responsible for their success. But too often, we focus only on frameworks that are the basis of most applications. And what about the rest? Here’s a list of top 10 frontend technologies worth a special highlight.
JavaScript that scales — TypeScript
TypeScript is an OpenSource programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It gives us a good stack of advantages for frontend development. Apps with TypeScript are super scalable and their code is easier to understand. Using it, we can minimize the number of bugs in an app, speed up its development and make it easier to maintain. Its code can be simpler to refactor as well.
Visual Experiences
Frontend technologies give us many CSS frameworks and libraries — Bootstrap created by Twitter, Material UI created by Facebook and Semantic UI. These types of libraries help us work quickly with the visual layer and provide full scalability from desktop screens to phones with minimal developer work. Often, in applications such as the Admin Panel where we do not have any designs, we can help ourselves with predefined templates and components that provide us with the type of framework which reduces the cost of the application and also speeds up its development.
Three letters — NPM
Every frontend developer should know what Node Package Manager is. It’s the world’s largest software registry with a lot of collections of packages of source code for frontend apps and JavaScript related stuff. NPM often provides us with ready-made solutions when creating an application. It also helps us save time and client’s money.
Hybrid Application
On the list of frontend technologies, Ionic is a development kit used to build hybrid mobile applications. It consists of three main components — UI Sass-based framework, Angular, and compiler.
The sass-based user interface structure is optimized for mobile user interfaces. The Angular structure helps you build scalable applications quickly. Developers apply a compiler (PhoneGap or Cordova) to create native applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The ionic structure consists of several functional CSS components that are ready to use.
Apollo Client
Apollo from the Greek mythology is considered the god of beauty, light and life. We can say the same about Apollo Client which provides us with all the tools to work with GraphQL in React, Angular, Vue and other most popular frameworks. “Apollo Client is a comprehensive state management library for JavaScript that enables you to manage both local and remote data with GraphQL.”
Apollo Client is the leading JavaScript Client for GraphQL that helps us consume GraphQL, providing all the necessary tools for cache in apps, queries, mutations, and subscriptions. Apollo also has amazing documentation with lots of examples.
Progressive Web Apps
The goal of PWA is to fill the gap between websites and mobile applications by using modern technologies such as push notifications, offline operation and splash screens. Their ultimate goal is to provide a flexible solution that will adapt to both desktop computers and mobile devices.
Most of them work like a website that can be downloaded as a shortcut to the home screen of a smartphone or tablet and used directly from there. It looks like an application and acts like one, ensuring a high level of user comfort.
PWA can help optimize the costs of our solution when we need a web and mobile application. But before we rush into creating a PWA app, we should look at a distant perspective — whether at some point our PWA application will not limit the functionality of our mobile app. At the moment it still has many limitations, mostly on Apple phones. For example, often used functionality like push notifications is still not supported and there are no perspectives to be added.
Frameworks — Angular, Vue, React
What are they and why should we use them? A web framework is a code library that makes web development quicker and easier, giving us ready-made solutions and patterns for building reliable and scalable web applications.
Actually we have 3 kings — Angular from Google, React from Facebook and Vue.
Which framework to choose?
The answer is simple. It used to be common practice to choose Angular for enterprise solutions, and React, Vue or something else for smaller projects. Generally, I do not agree. When choosing a technology, we should be guided primarily by the team — what we have the best competences and what we feel best in. It is also worth paying attention to the community checking whether it is large and helpful. If we choose a niche technology that does not have a large community, we may encounter a problem that will waste a lot of time and money, because no one will be able to help us.
