The efforts behind developing a full-fledged website or a web app depends on variable factors. As a front-end developer, you should always prioritize your creative skills while developing your site. But putting efforts towards the right direction will always help you achieve the targeted goals with ease. A professional front-end developer should have an excellent command over the multiple programming languages such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS – this will help you code the site and web app designs crafted by web designers.
How Front-End Development Tools Play a Crucial Role?
However, developing a website is not a cup of tea for everyone. There are lots of challenges you may face while working on your projects. The job of a front-end developer is to ensure everything is developed properly (back-end developer is the one who designs and develops the systems). In fact, they also make sure whether there are any errors or bugs on the front-end or not to simplify the web development workflow.
Fortunately, there are thousands of front-end development tools and libraries that will make your job much easier. There are bunches of tools for everything that will help you develop your next web project on time and on a budget.
Here is the list of 10 best tools and libraries for a successful front-end development workflow:
Libraries and Plugins
1. jQuery
jQuery is one of the most trending JavaScript libraries that empowers front-end developers to concentrate on the functionality of different aspects of what they are building, without ever distracting with browser inconsistencies. The tool also compresses the JavaScript patterns, such as AJAX for getting better outcomes.
Web developers use this tool to make the things such as animation, HTML document traversal and manipulation, Ajax, and event handling much easier, along with user-friendly API that works on multiple browsers.
Plus, jQuery enables developers to create visually appealing animations, incorporate plugins, or even just navigating documents for enhancing the overall user experience of the site.
2. AngularJS
AngularJS is a must-have tool for front-end developers. It is an open-source web application framework that helps you extend the HTML syntax for your application. The tool simplifies the front-end development process by making the entire environment accessible, readable and expressive.
With the use of Angular directives, a developer can read the HTML and JavaScript components to have the better understanding about the end result of UI. This helps a developer to craft highly interactive and impressive user interface for web applications.
There is also a two-way data binding feature that makes web applications highly-interactive with the browsers so that they can directly open or reload a new page, without ever wasting a single minute. In short, AngularJS is an incredible tool that can make your work easier as a front-end developer.
CSS and HTML5 Frameworks
3. Bootstrap
Bootstrap is one of the most popular buzzwords in the web that allows developers to create intuitive and interactive web projects quickly and easily. Since it is a great HTML, CSS, JavaScript framework, developers can create responsive and mobile-ready web projects using their skills and techniques.
The tool simply optimizes your website and app with a single code base, from desktops to tablets to smartphones with CSS media queries to help you run a responsive and mobile-first site.
Apart from this, you will get comprehensive and intriguing documentation for common HTML components, custom HTML and CSS elements, and top-notch jQuery plugins.
4. Foundation
If you are a front-end developer, then you should add this tool to your toolkit. It is the most advanced responsive CSS and HTML5 Frameworks that will help you develop a top-notch website and web app, without any distraction.
Foundation is a semantic, flexible, accessible and fully-customizable framework that allows you to design visually appealing websites, web apps and emails that work amazing on multiple devices and screen sizes.
It is a perfect tool for designing a top-notch website or web app – all thanks to its advanced features that can help you quickly prototype, customize and extend to get your projects polished and delivered to their potential clients.
CSS Preprocessors
5. Sass
You can’t neglect Sass if you are working on your front-end web development project. It is the most reliable, mature, and professionally-robust CSS extension language across the web. The tool helps you extend the functionality of an existing CSS of your site, such as variables, inheritance, nesting, and mixins with ease.
Since Sass is compatible with all CSS versions, you don’t need to take stress while creating a beautiful website or web app – use any available CSS library as per your requirement.
Plus, it comes with a ton of advanced features and capabilities that can help you complete your work before meeting a deadline.
Coding Tools
6. Zen Coding
Zen Coding gives you a modern way of writing HTML and CSS code. As a front-end developer, you always need a tool that can help you write HTML, XML or CSS coding, without any hustle-bustle.
With the help of this editor plugin, you can write and edit the code of a site in a matter of few minutes – this will save both your time and effort. It comes with a robust abbreviation engine that empowers to expand the expressions into multiple programming languages.
Overall, Zen Coding simplifies the writing and editing of HTML and CSS code for your web development project.
7. Prism
Now coding a website becomes super easy with a Prism. It is a simple, lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter that allows front-end developer to create and edit the different programming languages with ease.
The tool comes with a plugin architecture that lets you describe new languages or extend the existing ones in no time. Plus, it simplifies the styling process by letting you complete styling of a site via CSS, with sensible class names such as .string, .comment, .property, etc.
Browser Add-on
8. Colorzilla
Colorzilla is a mind-blowing color picker browser add-on that can help you get a color reading from any part in your browser. Then it instantly adjusts this color and pastes it into another program. Make sure that you zoom the page and measure distances between two points on the same page.
There is a built-in palette browser that lets you pick a color from ready-made color sets to save most popular colors in custom palettes. You will also get DOM spying features to help you get more information about different DOM elements on the go.
Plus, Colorzilla includes a robust CSS gradient generation that enables you to create beautiful gradients in minutes.
Debugging and Testing Tools
9. CSS Lint
Debugging and testing tools play a crucial role when it comes to developing the front-end of a website. CSS Lint is a powerful one source CSS code quality tool that lets you perform static analysis of source codes to help you encounter the issues related to the front-end design.
The tool helps you detect the bugs related to your CSS code. It checks the basic syntax and also apply a set of rules to the code to look for inefficient patterns.
10. Responsive Design Testing
Test your responsive websites using Responsive Design Testing tool. It is a great tool that can help you know whether the design of your site is responsive or not.
It comes with a simple and intuitive user interface that lets you enter the URL of your site into the given address at the top of this page to test the responsiveness of a particular web page.
Conclusion
These are some of the best front-end development tools that will help you develop each and every aspect of your website or web app within a given budget and time frame. To make your job easier, we have categorized all the tools as per their functionality and specific requirements. Now you can also create your own toolkit by choosing the most suitable tools from the above-mentioned list.
