Bootstrap

A good front end developer has to possess both a strong understanding of design essentials so that they can visualize a final product that will draw the eyes of their potential clients and a technical knowledge of the languages that run beneath the hood of their graphical interface so that they can take those design principles and put them into action. But smart development means minimizing the labor you put into your coding, and that's where frameworks like Bootstrap come in. Since its initial release in 2011, Bootstrap has developed a name for itself as one of the best libraries available, and it's managed to keep pace with competitors like Foundation as a great means for developing highly interactive, sleek, and professional user interfaces for websites and apps. While Bootstrap first got it's start as nothing more than an HTML and CSS style guide, it's since blossomed into one of the largest website development repositories around. Bootstrap concerns itself solely with the front end of things, unlike many other frameworks, but that allows for it to zero in on what it does well. Its design templates include typography, buttons, forms, and navigation, and with the variety available, you can easily find components you can plug and play into your code without having to go through the laborious process of building these components from scratch. Bootstrap was first designed by Twitter, and you can see that DNA imprinted on it even a decade later. The grid system utilized by Bootstrap has become one of the most popular trends in modern website design, and it makes it easy to construct pages with this sort of structure. That's not to say that Bootstrap is lacking range. It relies on less stylesheets that serve as the core templates, but it's highly customizable. You can pull out or add elements to these templates to create highly unique and complex designs, and the components on each grid can be stretched and altered to allow for a great deal of variety in design. Bootstrap also offers a number of designated CSS classes that allow users to achieve more complex HTML objectives with much less effort. Many of the more complicated aspects of Bootstrap are achieved through the inclusion of JavaScript code. These include carousels, dialog boxes, and tool tips. Front end developers would be hard pressed to find a more useful tool than Bootstrap. It can greatly simplify the process of writing in HTML and CSS, and the inclusion of complex JavaScript libraries further improve its versatility. Bootstrap 4 has further automated the design process with the inclusion of premium themes. These take the framework one step further by providing purchasable themes that are dynamic and ready to be customized to match the needs of your product or service. Bootstrap scales easily to a wide range of devices, meaning you'll have to spend less time field testing your sites for your variety of users.