The Rise of the Front-End Developer Part 1

Building and deploying data-driven applications, both web and mobile, typically requires a handful of development resources. Consider an enterprise application team consisting of a DBA, server-side team, client-side team, mobile team, and IT resources. Coordinating the work among team members and piecing together the front-end and back-end components of even a basic data-driven application is hard. But it shouldn’t be.

The good news is that there are many client technologies today that make front-end mobile application development a lot easier, particularly if you’re transitioning from web application development to “responsive” mobile app development. These front-end technologies include HTML5 for any device, great new client frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap and AngularJS , “hybrid” app technologies like Adobe PhoneGap and Sencha, and native development SDKs for iOS, Android, and Windows.

What’s missing is an easy way to create the back-end of your mobile application. Today the heavy lifting is done by server-side engineers. That means configuring servers and back-end software, building back-end service interfaces, and testing front-end and back-end integration. These are all time consuming and complex tasks, even for a simple mobile application.

We believe developing a mobile application from scratch should be dramatically easier for front-end developers. You shouldn’t have to become a “full stack” engineer to code and deploy a world-class mobile application. Taking the back-end roles out of the equation and enabling a front-end developer to build and deploy their work makes life alot easier.

We built DreamFactory to help address this challenge. More on that in our next blog post.