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Front-end

Introduction to Front-end Design and Development

What is Front-end?

As Developers adapt and grow to the ever-changing roles, technology, and tooling, it is important to understand the difference between various parts of the FPAC Application. While most Developers understand the inner workings of the backend, consisting of the server, application layer, and a database, the concept of the Front-end is sometimes ambigious.

The Front-end of a web application is any functionality, visuals, text, or process that takes place in a browser. In general, the basic technical components of any Front-end include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and combined they create the interface and interactions of an application.

While Developers are generally trained and have experience writing Markup, such as HTML, the skillset required to shape and style an application issing HTML, CSS, and light JavaScript is geared more towards an Interaction Designer or UX Architect. Cascasing Style Sheets have come a long way, and with the advantages of CSS Precompilers and build optimization tooling that have come about over recent years, it is helpful to have a better understanding about how these system work and how they can become an effecient part of the development workflow.

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