Front-end is the graphical user interface where users can interact with on their computers to communicate with the website’s database to view the information they need. To develop the front-end, developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework; and they also have to be aware of the constantly changing in the tools and techniques to create the front-end of a website.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic markup language (absolutely not a programming language), for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. Learning HTML is the first step in front-end development. Come after HTML is CSS, stands for Cascading Style Sheet, and is used for formatting markup language, mostly for HTML. Finally, while HTML and CSS creates the structure of the website, JavaScript is what powers its interactivity. Furthermore, learning JavaScript is a never ending process since there are new frameworks coming every year. Let’s take a look at the popularity differences between these web frameworks, according to the Stack Overflow survey in 2019 and 2020 respectively:
We can see that jQuery is losing their numbers to React.js and Angular and React.js looks like they will get that first place this year, but the top three most popular frameworks are all JavaScript. Besides, as I said that there are new frameworks coming every year, it means that when a better framework shows up, front-end developers have to learn it in order not to be left behind. For now, in my opinion, React.js is what you should go for if you want to get a role in this field.
Besides the programming language skills, there are other tasks that front-end developers have to be aware of. From my experience, a method called fake API is really important. For instance, in the process of developing the graphical user interface, front-end developers have to test their work by calling the API from the back-end team to see how the data fit into their blocks. However, in case that back-end team falls behind or somehow is not able to provide the front-end team with the built API, fake API is one useful method to test the front-end. Another frustrating task that I’ve heard about is that the design has to be responsive which means that the website has to run properly on any device, from the smallest mobile device to the largest desktop.
In conclusion, above is what I know so far about the front-end. Also, I found outstanding guidance about the practice of front-end development from Frontend Masters including almost everything we’ll need regarding a front-end topic. Check it out if you want to learn something in the front-end.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Vien's Blog by Vien Hua and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.