At the beginning of Web development history, the sites were static, having only basic styles without any dynamics. There were simple documents that contained links to one another.
In the course of time, the need to create various interactions grew and different browser web applications started to appear. The main directions included JavaScript, Java applet, Flash and Silverlight.
At first, browsers used different approaches to building webpages. The solutions like Java applets were popular because they worked independently of the software applications, but at the same time had the drawback – they were insecure and needed additional software. Eventually, JavaScript could provide all the possibilities to implement alternative platforms in development. As a result, while developing in JavaScript, external platforms weren’t used almost at all.
This way JS became a minimal solution for creating dynamic pages. At that time a need in interaction on the client-side of the web page appeared. The part of the business-logic has moved to front-end that enabled creating web apps independently from the server part.
It became a trigger to establishing front-end as an independent branch of web-development. Ever since the offset, JavaScript has used interactive HTML elements and with later – libraries that enabled more comfortable web-development (great example are jQuery, Prototype, and Dojo).
As the branch was evolving, new infrastructure solutions appeared for building web apps as Ext JS, jQuery UI, Backbone.js. With the help of these libs, the development proceeded in the direction of building user interfaces using JavaScript. It caused a challenge – the speed of building the interfaces.
It was difficult for the browser to build the structure of the document because it always had to redraw it. Therefore the conception of solutions with virtual elements tree appeared (virtual DOM).
Now the main solutions are React, Angular, VueJS. These frameworks and libraries allow building UI effectively, without spending costs and heavy loading on the browser.
From the point of view of the programming languages, JavaScript appeared at first as supplementary and didn’t include many concepts that are peculiar to real programming languages. But as time went on, new additional customizations appeared with its own syntax that was compiled in JS and was comfortable to use for the developer (for instance CoffeeScript).
Out of all customizations, TypeScript turned out to be the most widely used. With its help, the full object-oriented programming became possible as well as strict typing and a lot of constructions peculiar to fully-functioning languages.
Consequently, a whole new branch of front-end development appeared, with web app being just one of the possible clients of the server-side together with mobile and desktop applications. Most front-end frameworks show the stability of work now and are currently being optimized even further to perform better and become developer-friendly.
The front-end development has unlimited room for improvement as long as new platforms and frameworks are constantly emerging. That’s what makes great developers nowadays – the ability to adapt to changing technology and development languages.