Front-end development in recent years have seen lots of new developments. Thanks to a massive movement from typical desktop and mobile application built in native technologies like Java and C++ to Web applications built in html, css and javascript. Even a Web Application can be wrapped into a downloadable and installable desktop application for Windows and MacOS. And with PWA, it’s even possible for mobile devices too.
So, it’s obvious that lots of developers around the globe are interested to bring their solution to brighten up the world of web development. Though started it years ago, finally from 2017 it’s seeing massive focus on development of web technologies, even Microsoft jumped into the game with TypeScript.
Javascript development has seen lots of new libraries, frameworks to build things. Day by day, applications are becoming front-end focused. A back-end is supposed to serve data in JSON format and it’s front-end’s job to ensure received data is rendered properly in browser window.
This article do not show things which are launched recently, but things which have gained massive popularity in said period.
Rise of ReactJS
From last few years, React is becoming super productive for developers. With the launch of Context API, React hooks, it's clear that React is heading towards the future of javascript programming. React is now most used javascript library among available other options such as Vue, Angular. However, last year on github, Vue got more favorites than React.
NextJS
NextJs is a React framework specifically built for Server-Side Rendering. If you need a SEO friendly website, server side rendering or SSR is the only option to achieve that. NextJS does exactly the same along with powerful React engine. It inherits React's state management, routing, context api and delivers a beautiful framework to work on. Undoubtedly Next js is going to be much popular in coming days.
Nuxt JS
Just like next js, Nuxt JS does the same with Vue.js. Nuxt js offers scalable framework for Vue. And it supports Server-side rendering as well.
GraphQL
Graphql is half front end, half backend thing. The frontend part contains querying method. For javascript developer, with apollo library, you can send queries to your backend server for data. GraphQL invented by facebook is gaining massive popularity among developers because of its straight forward approach towards query. Literally it has changed the way developers create queries to fetch data from database.
Contentful / Prismic / Headless CMS
Want to buiild a blog yourself but lacking backend and database knowledge? No worries, with powerful tools like Contentful, prismic you can build backend service in minutes. All you need to create couple of forms there and input some data. Then browse through their documentations and fetch data as per your requirement. The best part is its technology independent, you can use any technology in front end, be it javascript which includes react js, node js, angular, vue or java, php, python. You can get data in structured JSON format to use. We are huge fan of Prismic and we use graphql to fetch data from prismic. it reduces cost for building separate backend, database and it's maintanance cost as well. Developent becomes 40% faster.
Svelte
Among new javascript libraries which are reactive, Svelte is gaining popularity among them. Its incredibly simple syntax making it super sleek to write and maintain code base. On top of that it avoids virtual DOM rendering and establishes the fact that it's much faster compared to React and VueJS
Web animations api
Web animation was neglected for long time. but now its seeing its time. with added efforts to create animations api for web, its now catching eye of developers to animate things without use of css.
CSS grid
Front end engineers around the globe think that CSS grid is the most powerful CSS notation available. Unlike flexbox it's a two dimensional system which means it can control row and column both.