6 Most Essential Front-End Web & App Development Tools

Having a web presence and a mobile application is almost a business necessity these days and every other firm has its own web and mobile applications or is in the process of developing them. Most firms ask specialized firms that provide web and app development services to develop new ones or upgrade their current applications, even if they have a basic know-how of the development. The reason being, developing an effective application requires both a design that gets the attention of their customers and an infrastructure that is up-to-date with the latest technology requirements. This requires dealing with all the updated development tools, which the novice developers may not be aware of. 

Front-end web development tools have become much more sophisticated and powerful in a very short period. Thanks to this enhanced power of these tools we can create amazing web applications much more efficiently. However, there so many web and application development tools available, that many novice developers get confused which ones they should learn to be an effective web and application developer. You can’t master all the tools out there, and you most certainly don’t use all of them. Developers can work together in teams and make sure they have the following skills available in their team to create their web and application development company.

We have put together a list of the essential front-end web development tools to help you decide your next learning objectives and to make sure you have at least some idea of all of these essential tools. This article only covers the front-end development tools, in a future post we will talk about the essential tools necessary for the server-side (back-end) development tools. So, without further ado!

• Built-in Browser Developer Tools

While they may be needed at the end of the development process, but their importance is first and foremost. Browser development tools are a set of very useful tools that are built-in to most web browsers and every developer needs to be aware of and learn how to use them. In Internet Explorer and Edge, they are known as “F12 Developer tools”, while in other browsers they are simply called “Developer Tools” with the browser name added before the phrase.

These developer-tools allow web developers to edit their HTML and CSS in real-time, or debug the JavaScript. There are numerous tools in this set that allow developers to gauge the overall performance of their website in real-time. These tools allow for performance optimization while analyzing the runtime performance, device responsiveness, code error detection and seeing the results reflected on a live panel.

• Sublime Text

Sublime Text – a cross-platform code editor that has a Python-based API – is used by many developers to make writing codes ultra-speedy and efficient. It creates a project-wide index of any kind of method and functions used and lets developers use a vast range of keyboard shortcuts to reduce the typing time. While each shortcut used once may only save a few seconds, but when used properly these shortcuts may reduce the total development time by hours or even days. There is a catchphrase very popular in the programming community, that is “keep your coding DRY” (That is, Don’t Repeat Yourself!). This means developers are always looking for shortcuts to avoid repetition. Plus, it reduces the chances of typing mistakes as developers can save error-free long codes in a single shortcut. The program also allows you to make the same changes in multiple selected areas of the code – again saving time. Last but not least the editor supports many programming languages including and not limited to JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

• GitHub

Consider the scenario where you worked on a project and did hours long coding. Now you realize that you screwed up and went at it all wrong. You changed the code so much that reverting to a previous version would take even more hours, and would still be error-prone. Well, to avoid such scenarios GitHub is a very useful tool for programmers who are slightly less vigilant (that is, most of us!). A subsidiary of Microsoft, GitHub is an online open-source hosting service where developers upload, share and discover software modules. By doing so, they create online backups of their projects and can always revert to the previous versions if they make any mistakes. Moreover, this website is one of the world’s largest communities of developers making it easy for developers to form up teams and collaborate on projects. A serious web and app developer should be a member of this community to gain useful resources and also to stay up to date on the latest developments.

• TypeScript

TypeScript is another open-source programming language that was designed for the development of large-scale applications. In comparison to JavaScript which a scripting language, TypeScript is an object-oriented programming language and allows for static typing. Codes written in TypeScript can be easily translated in JavaScript and vice versa. 

If you’re only learning programming for the fun of it (I’m not kidding, programming can be a lot of fun too!) then probably TypeScript may not be necessary, but if you are a serious front-end web developer or plan to become one, TypeScript is worth the time spent learning it. As it provides JavaScript developers access to quite powerful tools for writing advanced JavaScript codes.

• SASS

While Sublime Text helps web and app developers use shortcuts for the code lines, SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) is a CSS language extension. It is a CSS preprocessor that helps developers write maintainable, error proof codes that won’t require repetition. If a developer gets a grip of this tool, the CSS will be much more efficient and have an awesome design to look at.

• JQuery

JavaScript used to be a complicated language with lots of inconsistencies, that gave many headaches to developers while being an absolute must-have skill for web and app development service providers. This changed back in 2006 when JQuery was introduced. It is a cross-platform JavaScript library that has simplified the lives of many programmers. In its core JQuery works by abstracting a lot of functionality and allows for programmers to create animations, add plug-ins, or to find an element in a document with a specific property.

According to W3Techs, JQuery has a market share of over 97% in the among the 10 million most popular websites in the world. That shows the importance of having a strong grip on this web development tool. 

Conclusion

This article is a basic summary of the most useful and vital tools that almost every web and app development team should be good with. Although there are plenty of other tools out there that can increase the functionality of the team, however, these tools are almost a must-have. If you’re looking for a good web and app development company in USA for your organization, we recommend XintSolutions. A company that has a team of professionals that is proficient with not only all the above-mentioned tools but also with other development tools like Laravel, WordPress, BootStrap, XML, and Objective-C etc.