In this chapter, we will take a look at web application development from the frontend perspective, specifically with a Single Page Application (SPA), also referred to as a thick client app. With an SPA, a large chunk of the presentation layer is offloaded to the browser, and the browser is responsible for rendering pages, handling navigation, and making data calls to an API.

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Why do we use a frontend framework, such as Backbone.js, Ember.js, or Angular.js?
• What is a single page application exactly?
• Popular frontend development tools, such as Grunt, Gulp, Browserify, SAAS, and Handlebars
• Test-driven development on the frontend