What’s new in Front End Development?

Being a Front end development you must know the latest web technologies in 2016. Either you are a professional front-end-developer, or a beginner with basic knowledge of code, you must know what to opt and what to not. Web technologies are thriving faster and became a big challenge for developers. You must understand the working trends of the market and how to provide cutting edge products at the end. If you aspire for lucrative career in front-end-development, then you must read helpful resources to furbish your skills.

In the past, the word “developer” was only used for the persons who work on backend technologies. But now in 2016, the front end designers are also called as web developers. They are also dealing with programming languages like JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX etc.

Front end is not as simple as it was a few years back. It’s not just working with Firework’s and Photoshop only. Today, Front end developers should be able to deal with more compound technologies that become backbone of any successful developer.

Major Improvements happen in 2016

Let’s take a look at the list of most important and trending front end technologies in 2016:
JavaScript ES6 released Previously JavaScript updated to a new version named ES2015 or ES6. The tools Babel and task runner GulpJS are must to handle this version on old browsers.

Bootstrap 4 is coming in 2016

Bootstrap version 4 is going to be released this year and will have full support to flexbox. Migrating from Less, there is option in bootstrap 4 to integrate SASS. Basically 4th version is similar to the previous version 3. That means all your skills developed for 3rd version can be utilized in 4th.

SASS is used in Bootstrap 4

Less and SASS are trending CSS pre-processors this year. As mentioned above that Bootstrap is going to migrate from Less to SASS in its upcoming version, year 2016 is heading more to SASS than Less.

Use Flexbox for better layout experience

This year Flexbox should be in your checklist for experiment on your new projects, because, it eases the layout work in CSS. PostCSS, AutoPrefixer plugin are necessary to handle Flexbox’s different syntax requirements in few situations.

Youtube is now using HTML5

After ditching the Flash player, Youtube finally switched to HTML5. Adobe Animate’s default exports are also changed to HTML5. In 2016 job trends are growing in this field.

AngularJS 2 rolled out

New version of AngularJS called “AngularJS 2” has come with more improved structure. Angular 2 is loaded with some better app development features. Now it allows improved and simple form validation, two way data binding, routing and animations. The version 2 is totally different from previous one, as it requires ES6 and TypeScript knowledge.

Front end development Tools

With the expanding design needs, tools for client side development also keep changing. Below are couple of useful front-end web development tools for 2016:

HTML5 and CSS Frameworks

Framework 7, Foundation and Bootstrap are major tools used for ease to work with HTML5 and CSS. These frameworks are updated to meet the present design needs.

Testing and Debugging Tools

While working as a front end developer you have to face different kind of bugs, those can be investigate by testing and debugging.
Testing and debugging is main part of front end development process. There are some tools to simplify this process for example: Firebug, CSS Lint, JS Hint, Opera Dragonfly and Developer Toolbar.

Browser Addons

If used properly, browser addons can save a lot of your time while working for various parts of client side development. There is a big list of addons avialble for different browsers, but some of the most popular addons are Measurelt, Firebug, ColorZilla, Empty Cache Button, View Source Chart etc.

Plugins and Libraries

Developers are always writing codes with different languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScripts, so there are some plugins and libraries available for different languages which makes coding easy and fast. You can use HTML5 Boilerplate, Normalize.css, Modernizer, JQuery, JQuery UI, Datatables, YUI3, Alertify etc.

Online Tools

Online tools are increasing day by day and are available for almost all of your needs. In front end web development, you can take help of these tools to reduce your efforts and time. CSS Refresh, Responsive, Fontello, CSS Comb, JSontoHml, JSFiddle, Spritecow etc.
Above listed tools may help you to make your development works easy. But if you still need more tools then you get them here: https://fredsarmento.me/frontend-tools/

How to Stay Update with Latest Web Technologies Offline?

The best way to stay updated with latest front-end technologies is to keep in touch with some top blogs on this topic. These blogs keeps you update about the latest trends in front end development and also discuss about the functionality issues of the latest techniques. You can follow any of these blogs Smashing Magazine (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/), CSS Wizardy (https://csswizardry.com/) etc.

To stay updated with front end development trends, it is not necessary to stick with online resources only; you can take help from offline means too. Books have been proved beneficial in improving development skills. Take a look at some most popular and recommended books by experts:
1.HTML & CSS by Jon Duckett
2.CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmitt
3.JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
4.JavaScript and JQuery by Jon Duckett
All above updates can prove boons for many front end developers. Now, it is dependent on front end developers, that how they use these latest technical upgrades and create modern and effective designs.