High Performance Responsive Design

Chapter 7. Frameworks

Looking at the State of Responsive Frameworks

So far, we have looked at web performance patterns and anti-patterns in the world of responsive design. We’ve looked at crafting our own solutions to implement these patterns of best practices, both from the client side and the server side. Chapter 6 shows how to create automated tests via PhantomJS to verify the adherence to our performance-responsive design patterns and include them in a continuous integration (CI) workflow using Jenkins. In this chapter, we will explore some of the frameworks that are available, and analyze how they handle web performance. Different types of responsive frameworks exist: there are boilerplates that give predetermined page layouts; there are grid systems that just define responsive grid layouts; and then there are complete solutions that include different page layouts with reusable modules, web fonts, and JavaScript functionality.

If you look at the overall landscape of frameworks, the first thing you’ll note is that they are all implemented for the frontend. In these frameworks, there will generally be predefined CSS that describes the styling of a module such as a button or a grid, or even complex UI elements such as accordions and sliders and guided navigation. You can use these modules by assigning their classes to elements on your page. Some frameworks have a JavaScript API with which you can programmatically create styled elements on your page.

As of this writing, the biggest ...