Frontend development is the creation of a convenient, beautiful and effective client side of the application. Many beginners start from this direction of programming, learning markup languages - HTML and CSS, gradually connecting JavaScript and technologies based on it.
The quality and speed of work depend on the choice of tools, and it is determined by the tasks that the project solves. Let’s say that most websites today are created using frameworks. But sometimes a project can be written in pure CSS, HTML and JavaScript, and not impose a new layer of abstraction, slowing down performance.
CSS Preprocessors
These are add-ons on top of CSS itself, opening up new features of the language and making the work process easier and more accessible for the developer with the help of special constructs. Programmers call them “syntactic sugar”.
“Syntactic sugar” – constructions that do not introduce anything fundamentally new into the technology, but make working with it more convenient, simpler and more humane.
For example, in class names, you can use different special characters (except _,) to give expressiveness to the code. No matter what they say, learning CSS is pretty hard. The more you master the language and understand the nuances, the more you realize how poorly you know it.
Build Tools
Automation in JavaScript is great. Such an opportunity in modern development is provided by the Gulp and Grunt task managers, which work through NPM – Node Package Manager. It’s also good to try the Webpack module builder.
Thanks to these tools, you can automate the assembly of some files. It’s worth it, despite the likely difficulty in learning task managers. After working with the build tools, you will not want to return to the usual process.
Frameworks
There is no and cannot be a universal JavaScript framework that would fit the requirements of any project for obvious reasons: each task is individual.
However, remember that the frameworks that are fashionable today will replace others tomorrow, newer and more advanced. Always think twice before starting a project from scratch on your favorite technology: what if you can do without it?
IntelliJ IDEA is the main IDE (Integrated Development Environment) used by Java programmers to write, run and debug code. It has excellent support for popular frameworks (Spring, Micronaut) and a huge number of plugins that make development easier.
Text editors
There are regular editors for source code and IDEs – integrated development environments with many additional features and goodies. Both types of programs are free and commercial.
Validation and testing
The first is optional: you can also check the code in text editors or IDEs, so not all developers use separate tools for code validation. But we will name them too, so that the picture is complete: ESLint and JSLint. But developers have to test all the time.
Not all of these tools need to be understood in depth. As a rule, databases, Kubernetes, Jenkins/Teamcity, Grafana + Prometheus and ELK are administered by DevOps specialists. However, any Senior Java Engineer should have at least a user level knowledge of them in order to quickly find a problem that happened in a production or staging environment.
Load testing tools
Load testing allows you to evaluate the performance of software under various loads from the actions of a certain number of users. It is always important for businesses to know the performance of the software in real conditions, identify the main vulnerabilities and ensure the high quality of the software.
Load testing allows you to reduce the risk of failure after the application is launched in real conditions. However, if you want to perform load testing efficiently, you will need load performance testing tools to help you simulate virtual users and run test scripts.
The software market today is full of various load testing tools, ranging from open source applications to premium automated load testing tools. However, with so many options available, it can sometimes be difficult to choose the best load testing tool for your business. In this article, we will review the list of load testing tools and discuss the pros and cons of each.
Back in the day, creating web pages was the only realm of hardcore programmers, but that’s history now, given that there are plenty of tools out there to make the process easier.
Many of these programs, which have visual interfaces and are considered the best tools for creating websites, also have the ability to drag and drop blocks, add text and images, as if you were working on a presentation.
Web design tools
Other web design tools are aimed at programmers who act as advanced text editors and allow you to build a website more precisely. However, most web design tools exist somewhere between these two bases.
All of them make it easy to create the necessary elements on your site and can work with additional services such as form builders, hosting, even content delivery networks.
In this guide, we have focused on five of the most popular tools currently available. When weighing what to include, we focused on ease of use, supported web languages, cost, how easy the tools make it possible to download a finished project.