Application development has been in a constant state of evolution over the last couple of years and continues to evolve. The race is to deliver high-quality applications in the shortest possible time. The focus now is on a complete user experience. This drive is blurring the lines between development and design, paving the way for a sustained focus on front-end development.

Front end development is essentially a method of developing a website that allows the users to interact with it directly and gain access to information that is relevant to them. The goal is to combine programming and the design layout in a manner that powers the interactions of the user. If front end development was to be a car, then all the things you can directly touch and see to run the car such as the accelerator, the brake pedal, the steering wheel and the things that make it a cool drive such as the slick interiors, and the cool car design fall into its purview.

Why is front-end development gathering steam?

Today while it has become infinitely easier to develop great products, it has become that much harder to create products that the users will love and continue to use. In order to create software products that can capture the love of the users, it is now imperative to acquire a deep understanding of the users. This will help to develop a product that can be helpful to address their needs while delivering delightful experiences. With iterative product development becoming more mainstream, product design teams that were usually relegated to their own silo are being compelled to work more collaboratively in the software development ecosystem.

As front end development is picking up speed in software development so are the technologies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that enable it. In front end development, much of the front end work that defines the look of the web page is done in HTML and CSS. JavaScript is used as the programming language that runs directly within the web browser. Using JavaScript, developers can effectively design code structures that help them build fluid interactions, especially in applications that have complex user interactions.

1. Manage concurrent operations with ease
   JavaScript helps software developers immensely in developing web applications that need concurrency. Using the event loop programming model, developers can execute multiple instruction sequences at the same time and also handle concurrent operations on a single thread. This saves developer time and effort.
2. Faster Programming:
   In front end development you can develop the front end interfaces using HTML and CSS. Then in order to build user interaction, developers need to use JavaScript or one of the many JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, AngularJS, Backbone.js, ReactJS, or Bootstrap. They can streamline complicated commands and make the programming process faster and easier. Given that these frameworks are widely used and easy to learn, finding the right talent is never a problem.
3. Cross-browser Support:
   Good front end development is not just related to the code but also how the code interacts with the customers. JavaScript has a host of libraries such as jQuery that provide cross-browser support. This ensures that a dynamic web application can be run on any browser without any glitches. These libraries also help in simplifying and standardizing interactions between the JavaScript code and HTML elements. This helps in making web applications that are more dynamic and interactive. Further, JavaScript has several popular engines such as JavaScript V8, Chakra, JavaScriptCore and SpiderMonkey that help server-side development. They compile the JavaScript code to native machine code with ease and gives the language the capabilities of an interpreter, a compiler, and a runtime environment to run in a browser with ease.
4. Frameworks that provide ease of adding functionalities:
   Adding functionalities to web applications using JavaScript also becomes much easier since the wide range of frameworks have predefined functions. This makes the task of adding functionalities easier and less time-consuming. This also further simplifies the coding process and reduces development time and costs significantly while helping developers develop complex applications easily. For example, using Angular.js, developers can extend HTML vocabulary for custom applications with ease. Developers can also wire up the backend with form validation, deep linking, and server communication as well as create and reuse components.
5. Responsive Design:
   Since responsive design has become a critical component for web application success, developers need to ensure that the web applications that they design are device agnostic and can respond correctly to all form factors. Here too, JavaScript frameworks such as ReactJS, Angular.js come to the rescue and provide a host of options that make responsive application development convenient and efficient.
6. Universal/Isomorphic JavaScript:
   Universal/Isomorphic JavaScript is gaining prominence today as it allows rendering of pages both on the client and the server side. This isomorphism helps in better application maintainability, better application performance, and better Search Engine Optimization. Using JavaScript framework Node.js, it is also possible to write code that renders both on the browser and the server. Having this one set of code makes application maintenance much easier and allows developers reuse same libraries and utilities on both the server and the browser using libraries such as Underscore.js, Request etc.

In the fast evolving web application development landscape, JavaScript provides developers a comprehensive ecosystem to develop web applications that are smarter and create an impact. With JavaScript, developers get access to the right set of tools that help them create functionalities and UI’s. They can craft experiences that help in turning innovative ideas into successfully executed web applications that can capably capture the interest of the users – even amidst all the noise that surrounds them.