When the concept of Internet was new, web-development was for the most part a purely functional data centric endeavor. User experience wasn’t something that was considered in the early days, and there were not yet the tools in place to provide the level of aesthetic variety one now experiences.
Today front end development plays a much larger role in web and application development. The way a user interacts with data has become a priority for developers.
What is Front End Development?
Also known as client-side development, Front-End development is a relatively obscure Internet discipline. It is the practice of producing HTML, CSS and Javascript for a website or web application so that a user can see and interact with them directly.
The talented web development team at LTS possesses expertise in everything that Front End Development requires.
Front End Development trends:
1. Responsive web design:
As mentioned above, user experience has become central to the development of any website or application. Resposive Web Design (RWD) is becoming a must have feature for web sites. RWD allows the end users to browse web sites from multiple device platforms, including mobile and tablet browsers. RWD done properly eliminates the need to develop multiple website versions for multiple platforms. The site is designed to respond to the viewer’s screen pixel dimensions and uses CSS and Javascript to adjust the content to present properly on the users device.
2. Representational State Transfer (REST):
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architecture style that consists of guidelines and best practices for creating scalable web services.
Today, in the world of web development, mobile version of a website are becoming prioritized among enterprises, with regards to Web development architecture. When organizations develop Web apps and Web services, they align this with their mobile strategy.
Today Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the central point of Web apps and Mobile apps. Hence, developers are building RESTful services on server-side and front-end apps for both Mobile and web on the basis of these services.
3. Single Page Applications (SPA):
Web front-end development has moved to client-side with desktop like UIs on the browser. Here, developers are rendering the UI on the client-side instead of server-side rendering.
In SPA apps, front-end will be using the RESTful API for the data and build the entire UI on the client-side. In this context, JavaScript becomes a key technology for building web apps. Now, users can easily package these apps as Mobile apps to multiple mobile platforms using a hybrid mobile container such as Phonegap and Trigger.
In SPA based Web development, JavaScript is becoming a key technology, and JavaScript skill is more important than ever before.
Future of Front End Development:
1. Customization:
Previously, web development had limited scope for customization and web-templates used could not be changed. Hence, web-developers could not always cater to all demands of clients.
However, today with customization possible, developers can capture the vision of a client and this vision often goes beyond basic development. This has allowed for new functionality problems to arise. To many moving parts in combination with variations in browser and platform specifications can lead to web pages and applications no loading properly on different devices and platforms. Simplicity is often the key. The features on a website have to provide value. Developers and designers should build a flexible platform that is easily navigable; make it responsive, fast, informative, and helpful.
2. Going beyond Flash:
Going beyond conception, responsive design has evolved a lot and has come a long way. Interactive features that were previously available due to Flash, turned out to be unreliable and burdensome, and ultimately lead to it not supported supported on all devices. Given the need to be consistent across all platforms and browsers, technology solutions had to become increasingly sophisticated, striving to meet the demands.
The necessity to integrate web design and development with marketing will only grow in the future. The job of the front-end developer will be to make the website interactive and fun to watch. With website having a layout that is visually appealing, it can motivate the visitor into becoming a customer. The role previously played by Flash on the internet, has been replaced by video and interactive applications.
Important tools for Front End Development:
1. HTML5:
HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet that is used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. HTML 5 is the fifth version of this language. HTML5 is already supported in the latest web browsers on computers and tablets.
According to Strategy Analytics, there were one billion HTML5-capable phones sold in 2013, a huge increase from the 336 million units sold in 2011. This increase means that it is impossible to ignore the importance of HTML5 when considering your mobile site. Indeed, in some B2C and retail ecommerce client implementations Byte9 are seeing 40% of visitors accessing sites on mobile devices. This is a beginning.
HTML5 is cost-effective. It ensures Multi-Platform Development, good page ranking, consistency across multiple browsers, better mobile access to Business Intelligence and lastly, better user experience. HTML5 also supports Geolocation, extension of video to a wide range of platforms and off-line browsing.
2. CSS3:
Offering all the benefits of HTML5, CSS3 is the fourth version of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language. It provides the aesthetic framework that transforms raw data into content that the user can relate with.
3. Javascript (Angular JS):
In software development, AngularJS is an open-source web application framework maintained by Google and by a community of individual developers and corporations to address many of the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications. AngularJS enables you to create software more quickly and with less effort. It improves the testability of your software and allows greater collaboration.
At LTS, we offer Java Development services and Java Support services, along with HTML5 and CSS3.