Evolution of frontend development

1990–1995: HTML, CSS and JavaScript are invented

• The first HTML specification was made public in late 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. (31 years ago, now is the year 2022)

Tim Berners-Lee

• In 1995 a new browser scripting language called Mocha was created by Brendan Eich in just 10 days. It was renamed eventually to JavaScript.

Brendan Eich

• Ecma International is responsible for developing JavaScript specifications.
• HTML and CSS specifications are under the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C.

1996–1999 Browser compliance is terrible. Standardization efforts begin

• During the early years of the web, most browsers were not compliant with the standardized CSS specifications and a website could look totally different in another browser

CSS fun

• In 2007, the first iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs and soon it became very important to design your website for mobile screens.

Steve Jobs with the first iPhone

2000–2009 CSS frameworks begin to emerge. jQuery is born

• A lot of CSS frameworks were developed like Bootstrap in 2011

• Browser compatibility was often an issue
• One of the earliest library was jQuery. It was released in 2006. It helped write JavaScript code without the worry of browser compatibility

2010–2015 Frontend package management, new JS Frameworks are born

• In 2012, Twitter launched Bower, a package manager for frontend dependencies. It was used to fetch and download dependencies from all over the web
• In 2014, a central repository for frontend packages was created, called the npm registry.

• jQuery had trouble with handling data consistency across shared views. Several frameworks like Ember, Backbone were developed to tackle this problem.
• In 2010, AngularJS came into the market. It quickly became the most popular JS MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework

2010–2015 Angular makeover, React & Redux, Vue.js

• The AngularJS team totally redesigned the entire framework and called it Angular 2
• In May 2013 at a JavaScript Conference React was introduced. It was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer from Facebook. React had innovative features like the virtual dom, the one-way data flow and the Flux pattern (Flux pattern uses unidirectional data flow to pass data among the different component views in the app. The application is divided into store, dispatcher, views, actions creators.

• In 2014 a new framework Vue.js was released by Evan You. It has similarities to both Angular and React.

• In 2015, the Redux library was created by Dan Abramov and Andrew Clarke

Today: Static websites, new generation of high-performance lightweight frameworks

• Today React is the most popular JavaScript technology. A rich ecosystem of libraries and tools were built for React.
• Static websites are more SEO friendly, have better performance than server-rendered sites.
• Popular static site generators are Next.js, Gatsby (React), Nuxt (Vue), Jekyll (Ruby) and Hugo (Go)
• Trend: More people will start creating websites with very little technical background (Bootstrap Studio)