Front End Development, Web Development, Front End Development Tools

Tools for Front-end Development in 2020

Apr 29, 2020

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Prakunj Chaudhary
Software Developer
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In this fast-paced world, it is quite difficult to keep up with businesses and developers. We can accelerate web development through these front-end development tools.

Sublime Text - Text editor

Developers who practice front-end development often use a text editor or an IDE for coding purposes. It eases up your task and enhances your productivity by completing your mundane and redundant tasks. Sometimes these tasks include text highlighting, auto-completion or operations like enhanced search.

Sublime Text is a popular choice due to its extensibility and compatibility. It is defined as a GUI based cross-platform text editor. It allows a hassle-free transition between projects and files so as to make the focus on code more strong.

Node Package Manager

NPM is meant for JavaScript. It enables the NodeJS developers to discover the code’s packages that can be reused and integrated in a powerful manner. This tool flaunts 15448 stars on the platform of GitHub. This tool is one of the most widely front-end development tools which encourages the feature of code reusability.

TensorFlow

It is the second generation system of the Google brain. TensorFlow version 1.0 was released on 11 February 2011. It has the capability to run on multiple central processing units (CPUs) or general processing units (GPUs).

It possesses a flexible architecture and is available on Windows, macOS, and Android or iOS mobile computing platforms. TensorFlow is not only limited to front-end development but can also be stretched for machine learning development.

D3.js

The large amount of data generated by the netizens is collected and analyzed in order to generate insights before providing it to the decision-maker. For that purpose of visualizing data, the demand for several graphic tools has scaled up. D3.js is one such library in JavaScript.
D3.js collects data from multiple sources, reads and manipulates them accordingly to create quick views.
Older version of this tool was difficult to comprehend while the new version is user-friendly. From creating charts on an interface to adding animations to them, it offers a broad range of functions to choose from.

JAWS

A tool for accessibility: Web content must be made accessible to all kinds of users through web accessibility. Web accessibility tools are defined under three broad categories:
JAWS is a popular Windows screen reader. There are many users who depend on screen readers for consuming web content. Screen readers are meant to enhance the interaction of the user as it reads the contents of your webpages for him/her. So during testing, you must ensure that the screen reader is compatible with your website.

GitHub Desktop

Version control helps you to manage the code across your peers. With the rise of the distributed version of control systems, GitHub has come into this picture.
GitHub is a platform for web development that allows the developers to build software and manage projects. It is a GUI tool that helps in reviewing the codes and navigating through a project history.
It offers salient features like:

  • Better documentation with quality coding.
  • Alignment with the project management tools of GitHub.
  • It offers tools that are apt for the job.

Chrome Developer Tools

Whenever it comes to hands-on debugging, chrome developer tools are one of the top front-end development tools to the rescue. These are a set of tools built-in google chrome. It saves an ample amount of time for the developers as it allows varieties of testing in our browser.

However, you can test the responsiveness of your website by using the ‘device mode’.
It offers features like:

  • It helps the user to view Border, Margin, and Padding.
  • It allows the emulation of mobile devices.
  • It can be used as an editor.
  • It allows disabling the cache of the browser when dev tools are open.
  • It allows for real-time debugging.

Codepen

When you need to share a front-end code snippet of an incomplete project for feedback, a cloud-based IDE called code playground comes into play. It allows you to preview the snippets in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. You can embed these snippets in your posts.
One of the popular code playground is Codepen that has evolved enough to offer salient features to the user. It allows the developers to share the demo of their work across the platform. The best thing about Codepen is that it is free to use.

Bit-Sharing components

We can harvest the components of any codebase and share that with a modular library in bit.dev. Each individual component of bit versions are tested in an isolated environment to reassure the sharing of only reusable components.
In this way, we can create a library of such components gradually and push the reusable components into the shared Bit collection. The Bit is used to improve team collaboration, maximize code reusability, and maintain a consistent user interface.

Slack

During the past times, e-mail was used by the developers for communication. It would be very difficult to track the task of file sharing and code reviews through email. Slack is an instant messaging tool that assembles with a collection of relevant services to offer communication on a single medium. In order to respond to custom commands, you can create your own chatbot and configure it as per your needs.

BrowserStack

You can assess your web application across several browsers and devices through chrome browser testing. You can also select the combination of browser and device that you wish to test as per your user statistics. BrowserStack is one such tool that performs this test which comes with a free trial. After the test is over, access to videos and screenshots of the test is provided through your dashboard.

Due to the changing pace of web technologies, front-end development tools are seeking a rise in popularity. To maintain the efficiency in workflow, we discussed a variety of front-end development tools above. Let us know what is your choice of tools if anything apart from them and feel free to drop in your suggestions or feedback in the comment section below.


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Prakunj Chaudhary
Software Developer