Essential Tools, Libs and Frameworks for Front-End Development. What are you Using?

Rey Bango 15 Comments

UPDATE: The poll is now closed. You can see the results in this blog post.

I want to compile a list of the most common tools, frameworks & libs web developers are using today. Things seem to change daily with new, cool, and helpful projects announced all the time. It’d be great to nail some of these down as a reference.

Examples:

jQuery
Backbone
Underscore
Grunt
Mocha
RequireJS
HTML5 Boilerplate
Modernizr
SASS
Compass

Rebecca Murphey took a stab at this a couple of months ago.

So, what are you using that makes your front-end dev insanely easier?

Rey Bango

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15 Comments

  1. By “tools”, I take it you’re including applications?
    If so, Sublime Text 2 saves me time every time I use it.

    Also, Twitter Bootstrap can save hours of setup time on new projects – with the caveat of required customization for production to avoid “that Bootstrap look.”

    • Hey Sean, I’m talking about sites or applications. And yea editors are definitely in the mix. I setup a poll that actually includes it since it seems to be the editor of choice.

  3. jQuery is my favorite ECMAScript Framework, on board of HTML5Boilerplate, edited in Sublime 2, published mostly via Filezilla and WinSCP. Smaller changes are made over PuTTY within vi :)

  4. Tools: Chrome, Sublime Text 2, CodeKit, Fireworks and Terminal
    Libs: jQuery, Modernizr, Underscore, Grunt, Jasmine, Selenium (Python), LESS, Boilerplate
    Websites: ClosureCompiler, Arantius Tabifier, Colorzilla Gradient Generator, JSBeautifier, Prefixr, lessphp

    All of these help me a lot! Oh, we can’t forget Grooveshark, iTunes, Quake 3 and Unreal haha

  5. Hey Rey,

    I’d like to add some I’m using in a daily basis:

    Stylus (CSS pre-processor like SASS)
    Nib (Stylus version of Compass)
    Lo-Dash (high performance Underscore)
    CoffeeScript (JS pre-processor)

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  7. Hi,
    I am trying to get my arms around the whole web app space and this helps.
    Can we attempt a version 1.1 for this. Here’s a reordered list that I feel may help organize stuff. I may have got a few classification titles wrong and there is always going to be a debate of what fits in where.
    Regards,
    Ravi
    Core Frameworks
    jQuery
    YUI
    Zepto
    MooTools
    Dojo
    ExtJS

    UI libraries
    jQuery UI
    Wijmo
    Kendo UI

    BoilerPlate
    HTML5 Boilerplate
    Bootstrap

    Architecture
    Backbone
    Ember.js

    Utilities
    RequireJS
    Modernizr
    Underscore

    Developer Tools
    Git
    Sublime Text 2
    JSBin
    JSFiddle
    dabblet

    CSS Tools
    SASS
    Less
    Compass
    -prefix-free

    Testing tools
    Jasmine
    Qunit
    Mocha

    Build tools
    Grunt

    Templating Engines
    KnockoutJS
    Handlebars
    AngularJS

    Languages
    Coffeescript

  8. In addition to some of the more general purpose framework tools others have already mentioned, when.js is a beautiful little promises library. I use it everything. Can’t say enough good about it.

    https://github.com/cujojs/when

  11. jQuery
    Backbone
    Underscore
    RequireJS
    HTML5 Boilerplate
    Modernizr
    SASS
    Compass
    KnockoutJS
    Handlebars

    That’s it, my “Swiss Army Knife”

  12. Tools: Chrome, Coda 2
    Libs: jQuery, Modernizr. HTML5Boilerplate, YUI
    Websites: Arantius Tabifier, JSFiddle, BrowserLab

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