20 Top Frontend Developers Tools in 2020
My personal opinionated list of tools for writing, reading and maintaining frontend code in 2020
We’ll be taking a look at the top 20 front-end developer tools in 2020.
1. CodeKit
This is a tool that can save front-end developers a lot of time when deploying their applications.
It prepares many types of files for deployment. Processing SASS and LESS files, minifying JavaScript files, and CSS, optimizing image files, and compiling many other file types like Pug, Slim, Haml, TypeScript, JavaScript, ES6, Markdown, and JSON are just some of its uses. You can also manually configure other file types.
Cache busting is another feature that makes your changes effective immediately.
2. The Polymer Project
The web engineering team of Chrome initiated the Polymer Project in the hope of making the web better.
It provides many light web components from which an app can be made entirely. Included libraries give developers the ability to use the power of Web Components, Service workers, and HTTP/2. The components are made to work well with browsers and the majority of frameworks.
LitElement and PWA Starter Kit are some examples that encourage best practices.
3. Web Speech API
The web speech API is an open-source tool developed by Google. It can be used to add speech recognition to front-end applications. It can also be used to synthesize speech based on the text that is provided.
The speech recognition API has multiple interfaces for controlling, grammar and results. Recorded speech is analyzed by the API and then returned as a matching text. These results can then be used for different actions on your applications.
4. Bit and Bit.dev
Bit (Github) lets you easily “harvest” components from your codebase and share them to a collection (a library) in bit.dev.
Bit versions each component individually and when you’re ready to share it, it builds and tests it in an isolated environment, to make sure you’re sharing truly reusable components that are not coupled to your project.
You and your team can browse through your collection using Bit’s search-tools and playground, npm install a shared component just like any other package or bit import it, to modify it in your local dev environment (and even push the modified version back to the shared collection).
It’s a great way to gradually build a modular component library. Whenever you build a reusable component worth sharing — simply push it to the shared Bit collection.
Use it to improve collaboration with your team, maximize code reuse, build more scalable and maintainable code, and keep a consistent UI.
Bit supports React, React with TypeScript, Vue, Angular and many more.
5. Grunt
Grunt is a JavaScript task runner used for automating routine tasks included in the development process. Installation is simple using npm. After installation, the package.json and grunt config files can be configured.
Grunt allows automation of many day-to-day tasks such as minification, unit testing, and compiling. The most significant benefit of using Grunt over other similar tools is that it consists of a large number of plugins that are pre-configured for most of these tasks.
6. Meteor
Meteor is a full-stack JavaScript platform. It can be used to develop applications for the server, web, and mobile. A set of tools for building connected-client reactive applications, a build tool, and a curated set of packages from the Node.js and general JavaScript community are part of the platform.
One of the defining features of Meteor is that data is sent from the server instead of HTML and it is rendered at the client’s end.
7. Git Extensions
Version control is an important aspect of larger projects. Without it, there will be no proper control of the code base and changes done to it by many developers. In addition to maintaining changes to code, it allows to verify and approve commits in order to ensure that the code base is properly maintained.
In addition to its already feature-rich command-line interface, Git offers a graphical user interface called Git Extensions. The graphical representation makes it easier to visualize the history of committed and merged code. It also makes it easier to maintain branches.
8. SASS
Sass is known as one of the most mature ways of extending CSS. It is a preprocessor for CSS. Its core team has been actively supporting it for the past 13 years and as such is fully compatible with all versions of CSS.
Sass has received both industry recognition as well as community support to such an extent that many frameworks have been built with Sass, some of them are Compass, Bourbon, and Susy.
9. WebStorm
The IDE is one of the most important factors of the development ecosystem. While many editors support frontend development, WebStorm is one of the most well-suited options.
It supports HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Stylesheets with code completion, error detection, navigation, and refactoring. In addition, WebStorm can be used for projects with Angular, React, and Vue.js for Web, with Ionic, Cordova, React Native for Mobile, with Node.js, Meteor for Servers, and Desktop with Electron.
10. Foundation
Foundation is used for responsive designs of web applications or apps. It is designed by ZURB and allows for creativity along with accessibility to any device. It provides robust grid systems and supports larger projects. The design uses a medium grid that allows customization of the build. It provides a large set of templates and built-in codes. It is less popular as compared to Bootstrap due to it being relatively complex for beginners.
11. Chrome Developer tools
Chrome developer tools consist of a set of tools that are built directly into the Google Chrome browser. It can help you to inspect pages and their components on the fly without having to go back to the IDE. This can expedite the development and debugging processes.
Debugging is another important feature of Google developer tools and allows us to follow the values of variables and ensure that the application code is functioning correctly. In addition, it is also possible to investigate CSS rules, and many other areas such as network activity, memory usage, and page load times.
12. Novi Builder
Novi Builder is a versatile drag and drop editor for creating HTML designs and components.
Some of the features that are included with Novi builder are a comprehensive text editor, context highlighting editor for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Intuitive context menus, Media libraries, and responsive layout previewing. Many pre-defined designs are available so that you don’t need to start from scratch.
13. One Membership
One is a premium web development kit with many types of useful components and themes. It allows the user to create working blogs, eCommerce websites, landing pages, and business-oriented sites. One provides various built-in design themes, templates, plugins, and graphic elements.
It has a good support team that cares for the security of the application. The annual license is unlimited and the updates and changes in features are regularly updated.
14. Creative Tim
Creative Tim is based on Bootstrap and these templates accelerate your development process. It provides pre-built templates for Bootstrap, Vue.js, React, Angular, Node.js and Laravel.
They provide various types of design elements consisting of admin dashboards, UI kits, and landing pages. The elements in each of these templates can easily be manipulated to add the functionality and data of the user. Creative Tim also provides a large range of premium products with reliable support.
15. Chart.js
Chart.js is a free and open-source tool for adding charts to your front-end web application.
It supports eight types of charts including bar, line, linear, time-scale, and linear-scale. The latest version of Chart.js supports mixed animations, animations, and new axis types. It is based on HTML5 and is fully responsive.
Adding a chart is as easy as referencing the required script and CSS files. Then you’ll simply need an HTML element that can be used to deploy the chart.
16. Vetur
This is the official Vue extension for VS Code and is powered by vue-language-server. It adds error checking, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, formatting, IntelliSense, debugging, and Vue snippets.
You will need to ensure that there are no other Vue related plugins are installed as some of them can conflict with Vetur and render some features non-functional.
17. ESLint
ESLint is a tool commonly used with many text-editors and it provides error identifying capabilities. It can also be run as part of your continuous integration pipeline. ESLint will also suggest fixes that can be automatically implemented. These fixes are syntax aware, so it won’t affect your code like traditional find and replace tools.
You will also be able to preprocess file types where necessary and configure your own rules in addition to ESLint’s default ones.
18. Alertify.js
This is a great tool for easily adding dialogs and notifications to your front-end web applications. It allows for creating many types of models with various styling options and themes.
Alertify.js also supports movable and resizable modals that are fully responsive. Notifications can be added in an unobstructed manner so that users are alerted of relevant actions while performing their routine activities.
i18n and RTL Support is also available to provide language features.
19. Materialize
Materialize is a responsive front-end development framework based on Responsive design.
It speeds up development by providing you with styles not only for default components but also in a manner that they can be easily used with custom components. Material principals have been used to a great extent to create a framework that provides components and animations to create a unified interface that provides better feedback to users.
Detailed documentation and clear examples make it easy to learn and implement.
20. Jasmine
Jasmine is a behavior-driven testing platform for front-end web applications. It is based on JavaScript. It has no dependencies to any other JavaScript framework and does not require a DOM to function.
The syntax is very clean and easy to understand. A stand-alone application is also provided with sample tests. It has very low overhead and has no dependencies. You will be able to run both browser tests and Node.js tests through the same framework.
Conclusion
Front-end development tools are essential for creating a dynamic and responsive web application. We looked at many types of tools that can be used throughout the development process.
While not all of these tools will be useful to you at the same time, it will be important to identify a suitable mix in order to expedite your front-end development projects.
