Development and Architecture

We tend to solve a lot of problems related to the front-end by delegating them to existing programs. We use libraries and tools which we don’t understand completely - our code base grows and grows. But lately this trend seems to change and we slowly re-consider what we can do best: develop front-end code. What can we expect from this new trend and how can we use them in out daily business today?

When writing JavaScript applications or websites a lot of developers write unit tests to ensure the code does what it is supposed to do. The hottest code uses ES6 and transpiles to ES5 with Babel. Mocha is pretty popular as a testing framework these days. Bringing these tools together can be cumbersome. Here is how you do it.

npm is a Node.js’ dependency management system. It provides a script object in a project’s package.json configuration which can hold several CLI scripts. It is possible to run those via your command line. This way it is possible to replace your current build system. This article covers more about how you replace different tasks of a typical front-end build workflow.

Different projects I have worked on used Sass as the pre-compiler of their choice. This post shares some learnings we had while using Sass. There are a couple of great articles on how to use Sass in large scale projects — this one is more of a retrospective. I hope it helps you solving problems if you ever run into them. I wrote about some of my recent projects and the learnings I had.

INIT is based upon HTML5 Boilerplate and adds more structure for SCSS files, JavaScripts, includes build tasks and a whole lot more. Today we released INIT, a front-end framework based on Grunt, Bower, Karma and a lot more tools as version 1.0. This marks a special day for Anselm and me, as we worked for a long period to get this project to where it is today. Over at TNG I wrote a bit about why we need frameworks like these and what the challenges with current tools are: Generally we start a lot of our projects in kind of