Chapter 1. Tooling in a modern front-end workflow
This chapter covers
- Tedious and repetitive tasks of a front-end developer
- Scaffolding boilerplate code
- Dependency management
- Build tools and task runners
- A combined toolchain and workflow for front-end development
This is a great time to be a front-end developer. Browsers are more advanced than ever, and with the new technologies of the HTML5 era come numerous new possibilities. JavaScript isn’t a toy language anymore and is used for a large variety of applications. The fat client—running the majority of an application’s code directly in the browser, and thus the front end—is embraced and considered a good development strategy for web applications.
With JavaScript being taken seriously, developers face challenges in delivering the best possible code for their platforms—running authoring tools, bundling files, minifying applications, optimizing images...the list goes on. To meet all those expectations you need proper tooling.
In this chapter, we look at which non-coding tasks you have to tackle in your day-to-day workflow and how tools can help you as front-end developers. We divide those tasks into three categories and look at three tools to conquer them all: