A Comprehensive Guide to Front-End Development Tools and Techniques

As a developer, you must have come across a lot of tools and technologies while working on your projects. Some of these tools are designed to enhance your productivity and help you organize your code effectively. In this blog post, we will explore some of the popular front-end web development tools and techniques that every developer should know

NPM:

NPM or Node Package Manager is a popular package manager for JavaScript that allows developers to install and manage packages efficiently and organized. NPM simplifies the management of larger projects as we don’t need to keep track of all package script versioning, and any new developer can easily install all the project dependencies without any need for configuration.

NPX:

NPX stands for Node Package Execute, which comes with NPM. It is used to run an npm package without even needing to install it. We can use it when we want to install the package for a single time.

Bundler(Parcel/Webpack):

Parcel and Webpack are popular module bundlers in JavaScript. A bundler is used to bundle all the modules together efficiently without any need for manual configuration. A bundler enables lots of features like code-splitting, minification of the production code, hot module replacement, and many more.

The difference between Parcel and Webpack is that Parcel is a zero-configuration bundler, meaning that you don't need to write any configuration files to get started. In contrast, Webpack requires a configuration file to define the entry point and output.

• Tree Shaking:

  Tree shaking is a well-known concept in JavaScript, which means removing or eliminating dead code. For example, when we import React from ‘react’, we use only 2 or 3 things from this React package, but it imports the whole library in itself. So, using tree-shaking, many module bundlers eliminate the unused code, optimizing our production build.

• Hot Module Replacement:

  Hot Module Replacement (HMR) is also used for enhancing the development experience. It reflects the changes that have been made while the application is running without the need for reloading it.

• Code Splitting:

  This allows you to split your application code into separate bundles which can be loaded on demand, resulting in smaller initial bundle sizes and faster load times

Node Modules:

Node_modules is a directory that contains all the packages that are installed via the Node Package Manager (NPM).

GitIgnore:

The .gitignore file is used to put all the files that we don’t want to track in Git. We should put everything in it that is not needed by our application like node modules, which can range into GBs in size. We should not put anything in this file that we want to add to Git like our code files.

Package.json and Package-lock.json:

Package.json can contain the minor or major version of modules that we are using, and it contains the meta-data of our application. Whereas Package-lock.json will contain the exact version of the module we are using because this minor or major can break

Dependencies and dev dependencies:

Dependencies are packages that are required for the application to work correctly, while devDependencies are used by developers for enhancing their development experience. DevDependencies have no impact on the project.