Best Front-End Development Tools in 2020
Front-end development is crucial for the success of any business that interacts with users through a web or mobile application. It takes less than a second for an average user to form an opinion of an application, simply by looking at its appearance. Hence, the layout together with the UI design, functionality, and navigation experience play an important role.
Front-end development is evolving very quickly, with many frameworks and tools appearing and replacing each other. However, the more the options, the harder is the choice. While choosing among a diversity of front-end development tools, easy handling, cost-effectiveness, portability, scalability, and customization should always be at the forefront.
Below are the most popular and essential tools for front-end development in 2020.
Best 2020 Front-End Development Tools
Vue.js
Vue.js is one of the most popular JavaScript development tools for front-end development. Having kick-started as an ambitious project of a Google developer, Vue.js has become an open-source progressive web framework of a versatile nature.
Highlights
· Versatility
· Empowered HTML
· Adaptability
Angular.js
Angular is a universal JS MVVM framework used for front-end web, native mobile, and desktop app development. With the new 9.1 version released, several improvements were introduced like TypeScript 3.8 support, the compatibility with new compiler and runtime performance, TSLint 6.1 by default, HTML, expression syntax improvements.
Highlights
· Two-way data binding
· Detailed documentation
· MVVM
React.js
Open-sourced by Facebook in 2013, React is one more JS library used to create interactive UIs.
Highlights
· Easy-to-use
· Flexible
· Virtual DOM
Ionic
Open-source and free, Ionic has a library of tools for creating fast and interactive applications both mobile- and web-development.
Highlights
· Cross-platform
· Pre-engineered components
· Native device functions
Meteor
Meteor is a mature, open-source JS framework used by front-end developers worldwide. To put it simply, it helps to create responsive desktop, web, and mobile apps.
Highlights
· Efficient
· Fast
· Flexible
Grunt
Grunt’s ecosystem with a great number of plugins, allows to automate almost anything with little effort.
Highlights
· Automated
· Vast
· Adaptable
Grid Guide
If you intend to generate ‘pixel-perfect grids’, Grid Guide is a perfect match. Grid layout is the unprecedented CSS layout system. Being two-dimensional, it can handle rows and columns. Working with it is pretty simple — you can apply CSS rules to the Grid Container (the parent) and Grid Items (the children).
Grid Guide is mainly about flexible and fixed track sizes, alignment, and overlapping content control.
Highlights¶
· Convenient
· Functional
· Flexible
Sublime
Sublime is known as a sophisticated cross-platform text editor. Sublime Text can generate a project-wide out-of-the-box index of each method and class enabling auto-completion.
It effectively processes both files and folders customizing literally anything and offering split editing and instant project switch.
Highlights
· Reliable
· Fast
· Customizable
Chrome Developer Tools
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other browsers have front-end web development tools as add-ons to assist the developers.
Chrome DevTools allow users to monitor pages as well as their components pretty fast speeding up the debugging and development process.
Bottom Line
Elaborating on essential tools for front-end development as of 2020, front-end engineers have a chance to choose from top mainstream ones. Some of them are highly supported by the community, others lose their traction over time or constantly leap on the graph of the most in-demand front-end frameworks.
