2016 is already exciting for frontend developers with all the new presents received through Christmas and New Year. We will see the top 5 contenders this year so far for frontend frameworks which we are using at Agira. These frontend frameworks make life much more creative for our developers and every techie in this arena has his/her favourite or go to framework. Yes, there is always the slightest bias. Nevertheless, we will see the most popular ones which we are using at Agira this year. We are listing three web major and two mobile major frontend frameworks in this article.

Bootstrap

This became a household name a couple of years back itself, and it is yet to stay. Although the awaited V4 is still awaited, their alpha versions have been interesting so far. Twitter’s Bootstrap is one of the most popular HTML, CSS and JavaScript frameworks for responsive web development. Although it is technically not much advanced from the other contenders in our list today, it provides way much more resources, articles, and forums that provides better support and easier access.

Bootstrap stacks robust and modern features, and with its HTML5 responsive web development frontend framework, developers can build a feature-rich and highly potential app without having to build much of components, grid styles, etc. and thereby offers a comprehensive web development experience.

Foundation

A child of ZURB, this one too has stayed for quite a while and is great a go to option for many developers. Similar to the Bootstrap framework, Foundation offers great support to HTML5 and provides web design frameworks for all types of applications and web templates, email templates, etc. It is popular for delivering high-quality performance and is apt for custom-built applications with handsets and other devices. With the release of Foundation V6, responsive web development has a new level of functions for the HTML5 framework.

ZURB has Foundation focusing on web sites prioritising mobile devices, and therefore offers several features to perform web development tricks from the handset itself. These sites can then be converted to apps and thereby allows development to focus primarily on functionality.
Foundation supports all browsers including IE, can be ported with Rails and offers many other specific features pertaining to Foundation, making it the toughest competitor to Bootstrap so far, providing well documented resources along with this open source front end framework.

Montage

Another open source platform that is highly reliable and has great supporting resources is Montage. It has evolved into a responsive native web development framework that thousands of developers have taken to, for its scalability and its high performance abilities.

Montage offers a module-based approach and is easy for developers to learn working with this framework, proving to be the best contender for single page applications (SPA). It provides features of building and re-using UI components, and other extensions. The GitHub public profile is highly popular which has several interesting on-going projects that can be included in the app development, and Montage offers a huge set of plugins, resources and libraries for an extremely comfortable application development experience.

Sencha Touch

This contender is highly popular for developing cross-platform web applications with its hardware acceleration techniques, allowing apps to perform on a varied range of devices. Plus, it facilitates the development of high performance UI components, which is core to modern web apps. For a HTML5 responsive web development framework that uses JavaScript for creating apps, Sencha provides numerous device-native templates and UI components that makes creating aps an experience.

Another plus with Sencha Touch is that it provides its own inbuilt data visualisation features and therefore does not require developers to access external tools for the same. The framework also boasts of providing native feel to the applications, be it web apps or hybrid ones, and surely lives up to it.

JQuery Mobile

JQuery is the most popular Javascript scripting library that delivers all the interactive and stylish features of the web. But JQuery Mobile is a contender that does much more than just this. It is a comprehensive responsive development framework that allows developers to develop a single responsive application that can operate perfectly across all devices.

The framework provides ease of development through responsive design tools, touch-sensitive form elements, UI builds and extensions, and many cool features that makes it one of the popular responsive development frameworks available today.

Conclusion

Apart from these, we have several many products available in the market today for developers to try their hands on. Many of these frontend frameworks have their own niche features and extra or special edges. Pure by Yahoo is a great framework for CSS and performs better than Bootstrap on mobile devices. Semantic UI has been popular for years now owing to its simplicity and it allows development with traditional code syntax. Onsen UI, Skeleton, Monaco, and several others are also great to work with, and are quite comprehensive.
All of these are the tip of the iceberg and loads can be learnt and achieved with hands-on trials of different products laid out for developers. It all boils down to what any specific developer wants and gets out of it as an essential development experience as well as a potentially awesome end result.