Recently, two major advancements were seen in the web platform. They were Web Assembly and Service Workers. They enable the users for fast and performing web applications that bridge the gap with native compiled applications. In certain, Service Workers are the enabling technology for Progressive Web Apps and bring support for Notifications to the web platform, with more APIs to follow in the future. 

This year, Angular.js 2 was released. The framework is supported by Google and is very popular among small enterprises and large companies. It has a large number of features that make writing everything from web to desktop and mobile apps possible. The framework is written in TypeScript, which is also the recommended language to write applications in. We think learning Angular 2 in 2017 would be a good investment, although, there is a lot to read about. 

Vue.js 2.0 also released this year. It inherits the good ideas from Angular, React and Ember, and place all of them into an easy to use package. Than the first two formers, it is also quite a bit leaner and faster. We suggest that this year, you should try to give a shot for it by starting with any one of Vue.js tutorials available online. 

Another solid choice is Ember for a JavaScript framework. It supports data bindings, auto-updating templates, components and server-side rendering. One benefit that it has over its competitors, is that it is more mature and stable. Breaking changes are much less frequent and the community values backwards compatibility. This framework is a good choice as it can be used for long-lived applications. 

Two other frameworks that can also be considered are Aurelia and React. It difficult to recommend it for beginners as in the last year, the ecosystem around React has grown considerably more complex. But experienced developers can combine the library with GraphQL, Relay, Flux and Immutable.js into a comprehensive full stack solution. 

The list wouldn’t be completed if we don’t mention Bootstrap in this frontend compilation. Its Version 4 is expected to release in 2017 and is currently in Alpha. Effective changes are the new versatile card component and the flexbox grid, which modernize the framework and make it a joy to work with. 

SASS and LESS remain the two most popular CSS preprocessors today. Apart from vanilla CSS is finally getting support for variables, SASS and LESS are still superior with their support for mixins, functions and code organization. If you haven’t already, take a look at our SASS and LESS quick start guides. 

You can learn one or more among these: Angular 2, Vue.js, Ember, Bootstrap, LESS /SASS.