Understanding Front-End Developer Role and Responsibility

  This is relatively new term is Software Industry. Front-end developer is mostly think of a “web Developer”, who is dealing mainly with visual elements of any website/web application. Which is not in actual if you will go in deep of this profile. Around 4-5 years back this profile was just a part of web-developer. But as the HTML 5 came in market this profile is going to be most demanded and shouted. Earlier this was just a part of Web Developers profile. At that time the web designer provides some images and css to developers and then developers keeps to create web sites or web applications. At that time the Developer were expert in their server side technologies e.g. in Java Server Pages, Asp.Net or Php and they use to work in their technology using the elements (controls) of their technology for creating the web site/applications.

But with the time as HTML went to HTML 5 this role is much more complex now and too much demanding also. The server technology guys are still expert in their own languages but they are not that much productive or interested for pure html based applications. And this is the reason for this profile. I am trying to list few skills which are unique to front end developer and also different from Server side web developer. Any additional skill you can mention is well come.

  • -Developing new cutting edge front end with modern technology.
  • -HTML, Java Script,CSS3
  • -AJAX, XML, JSON
  • -Consuming REST and SOAP based services.
  • -Partial loading of web pages.
  • -Application structure for Single Page Application.
  • -Responsive Web Design
  • -Writing reusable code and libraries similar to server side technology for future usages
  • -Modular coding i.e. Custom Components.
  • -Application Performance for loading and data consuming.
  • -Confirming technical feasibility of UI/UX designs
  • -Choosing right technology out of multiple JS frameworks and Libraries.
  • -Understanding of SEO
  •  -Validations and regular expressions
  • -Applying Transitions/Effects and Animations via coding on demand
  • -Thinking beyond the tabular Data related applications.
  • -Understanding of server side architecture of application/database for assisting back-end developers.
  • -Client side MVC (This is most important as it requires same depth of knowledge which is normally used as server side developer)
  • -Test Driven Development with Modern Tools

Though these all feature are enough for a front end developer, but as currently HTML based wrapper applications are running well on mobiles and tablets too, so having the knowledge for these platforms will easily make them capable to create hybrid mobile applications, which is also in demand.

Hope this will help someone.

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