Web development skills are grossly categorised into front-end and backend development. Any web development company must have skilled and experienced professionals comprising both frontend and backend developers. Frontend refers to all the client-side elements while the backend refers to the server-side elements. After understanding this basic difference you need to know what website frontend and backend functions are responsible for.

To help you understand in a simple way let us say that all the look and feel, UI & UX interface and features of a website that a user interacts with belong to front end while all the server-side coding and behind-the-scene output that helps these frontend elements to function belong to the backend. Both play an equally important role to deliver a useful and effective web experience.

As the required skills for frontend and backend development are different, generally the frontend and backend developers are hired separately for web development projects. If you are an aspiring frontend developer, you need to acquire certain skills and expertise in programming certain languages. Here throughout this post, we are going to explain these skills required for frontend development.

5 Must-Have Skills Every Frontend Developer Should Have

Every frontend developer must be versed with few technologies that for years have been synonymous with website development. Here we are going to explain 5 most crucial skills any frontend developer should acquire.

HTML and CSS

For building the client side web layout and look and feel of web pages, these two come as the basic technologies. Only with these two, you can create the look and feel of a web layout instead of plain text on the screen. While HTML is the most popular client-side scripting language, CSS helps to add style and ornamentation to help to make the content appear beautiful, appealing and useful for the users.

JavaScript

JavaScript helps the frontend developer to add functionality to a website. Along with HTML and CSS by using JavaScript a developer can easily create a very basic website. Moreover, JavaScript is also known to offer an array of iterative elements to a website.

jQuery

jQuery as the most popular JavaScript library comes loaded with a whole array of helpful plugins and extensions that web developers find extremely useful for building a website with JavaScript in quick time. This JavaScript library offers a lot if ready to use elements that help frontend developers to build sophisticated web functions without developing everything from scratch.

Javascript Frameworks

Another most crucial and increasingly popular frontend development skill is JavaScript frameworks. Though there are too many JavaScript frameworks for varying development needs they come as a ready help to kickstart your development process without building everything from scratch. By minimising the coding it helps bringing pace to the development process. Some of the most popular and widely used JavaScript frameworks include AngularJS, VueJS, Backbone, Ember, and ReactJS.

Debugging and Testing

The final skill that any frontend developer cannot do without is debugging and app testing. Having bugs and coding errors in the development process is quite obvious and to prevent them from harming the app performance you need to clear the bugs. You also need to use unit testing frameworks to test specific areas of the website separately. Through unit testing, you can know how your website behaves and where you need to address the shortcomings.

JavaScript Frameworks Frontend Developers Must Know

As we have seen briefly, frontend developers can boost pace and ease of development by using JavaScript frameworks. There are several useful JavaScript frameworks for web development but a few of them are more popular thanks to a variety of reasons including lower learning curve, features and performance. Let us briefly explain the 5 widely popular JavaScript frameworks.

-> AngularJS

AngularJS is regarded as the most widely used JavaScript framework for frontend web development. An expert Angular development company is likely to see more versions of a JavaScript framework than with others. As of now, it has come up with five subsequent updates and the Angular 6 update is supposed to be launch anytime soon. Let us see the key reasons developers prefer AngularJS.

AngularJS offers two-way data binding.

It comes with DOM manipulation capability.

It offers a comprehensive range of features for modern web UI and UX.

It enjoys continuous and robust support from Google.

Developers also enjoy constant support from a huge community base.

It comes with inbuilt support for progressive web apps.

It is equipped with an optimizer that helps integrating Material Design

-> ReactJS

React JS is the most popular JavaScript framework that has been built by Facebook. Developed and maintained by Facebook it is a great framework for creating sophisticated user interfaces. The framework is mainly popular because of its ability to integrate with any architecture and reusable components.

ReactJS comes with a very low learning curve

Virtual DOM of ReactNative delivers great UX and boosts performance

React Native helps faster development with reusable components.

React Native provides stable code by allowing data flow in one direction

It comes with an open-source library accommodating contributions from developers all over the globe.

React can be rendered on the server side.

-> Vue.js

Vue.js is a JavaScript library having many similarities with ReactJS. But it is a much lightweight and lean framework. With a deeper look, it is revealed that the framework combines the goodness of the two popular frameworks, namely AngularJS and ReactJS. In spite of being a lightweight framework having Redux library, it helps to build highly sophisticated apps with a complex interface. Here are some reasons developers prefer VueJS.

Vue.js is small-sized and extremely lightweight.

VueJS has a low learning curve.

It comes with comprehensive documentation

It is a highly flexible framework that used to allow two-way communication

-> Ember.js

Ember.js is another widely popular open-source frontend JavaScript framework that basically works on the Model–View–Viewmodel (MVVM) pattern. The framework allows you to build highly scalable and feature-rich single page apps. The framework is particularly well known for data management and application flow. Here are some reasons developers choose EmberJS framework.

The framework is highly geared to ensure optimum performance.

It comes with its own debugging tool called Ember Inspector

It comes with two-way data binding feature.

The framework also comes with comprehensive documentation

The framework is very well organized

It ensures faster development with the use of Ember CLI

-> Backbone.js

Backbone.js is another popular lightweight JavaScript framework that works on the Model–view–presenter (MVP) pattern. It is also the framework that comes with RESTful JSON interface to help developers build a sophisticated web interface. Here are some of the reasons to choose BackboneJS framework for web development.

Helps to build front-end apps easily with all sophisticated feature set.

It is capable to come with automatic updates of the HTML code whenever the app model goes through any change.

It is capable to support a wide variety of projects.

It enjoys the support of a large community.

It also syncs with the backend of the app easily.

Conclusion

All the above-mentioned technologies and frameworks are widely popular among frontend developers primarily because of their performance, comprehensive documentation, feature set, lower learning curve and flexible integration with other architectures.