In 2025, setting up new web development projects is still really, really annoying. And honestly, it’s one of the reasons I either prototype a new project in a single HTML file, or don’t manage to find the energy to prototype a new fun idea at all. Starting a new front end project involves a never-ending list of administrative tasks and decisions to be made, when all you want to do is get building. Your list of setup tasks might look something like this:
Set up a new development environment (install e.g. correct version of node, npm, yarn, pnpm, bun)
Set up a new project (create directory, choose framework, choose starter project or boilerplate, install dependencies, ensure they are compatible with each other)
Define a file structure and component library approach
Define a base style guide and CSS resets
Write boilerplate code to connect to APIs and databases
Configure a build and deploy pipeline
Configure Webpack???
And, if you’re working with a designer, you’ve also got the back and forth handover and sign-off processes to go through, which in a busy team or multi-project agency, can really hold things up. You just want to get building!
There are some alternatives to the time-consuming, decision-heavy setup process. You could use virtual machines or environments that enable faster time-to-setup through scripts and automated processes. But still, even this requires some effort and “onboarding". I remember at one job, I went through a “tried and tested” vagrant virtual machine setup process that didn’t actually work correctly with my version of MacOS at the time. Now, granted this wasn’t a brand new project, but it took me a full working week to configure my development environment so that I could be productive. So what are the alternative approaches? Recently, I’ve become curious about visual development frameworks.
What is a visual development framework?
When you use a visual development framework, you're working in an environment where you don't need to think about — or do — any of the relentless admin and project configuration tasks described above. Everything is taken care of from the beginning, and you're ready to start making components, fetching data from APIs, adding custom code, and watching your ideas come to life straight away. Visual development also removes the need to translate designs from design software to code: the design of the user interface is baked in to how you build it. No more handovers between teams!
In summary, visual development solves two key problems in front end development: it abstracts away the repetitive administrative setup work, and removes the inconvenience of separate design and dev environments.
Here's how working with HTML, CSS and data from an API looks inside visual development framework, toddle. You’ve got a document tree of HTML elements on the left, CSS styling and API connections on the right, and the visual result in the middle. In traditional text-based development, this weather widget might be powered by a collection of files dotted around a codebase. In visual development, it’s all right there.
Is this the next big step for front end development?
A common sentiment among the terminally-online community is that if you’re not writing actual lines of code, then you’re not a real developer; often the industry treats the process of development as the outcome, rather than the actual website or app produced. But when you think about how every evolutionary step of computer science has centred on abstracting away things that no longer make sense for a human to do, then visual development frameworks are the logical next step in the evolution of front end development.
For example, hardly anyone is coding in Assembly in 2025, and we don’t shun people for not being real programmers just because they don’t write instructions to add memory data to a register in a x86-family processor in original Intel syntax, or know the equivalent in AT&T syntax used by the GNU Assembler. Most of us don’t need to worry about this anymore.
Whilst everything is a set of binary instructions at its core, we also don’t need to worry about writing code in binary, thanks to Grace Hopper who released the A-O compiler in 1949, which used symbolic mathematical code to represent binary code. And we don’t even need to worry about writing code in mathematical symbols, because soon after A-O, Hopper released B-O, or “Flow-Matic”, which is considered the first English language data-processing compiler. Each advancement removes another layer of machine-to-human obscurity.
What’s important to note, however, is that the evolution of programming languages was based on computation itself, not human-computer interaction (HCI). In the mid-latter part of the 20th century, there weren’t that many people using computers, and so HCI wasn’t a priority to be optimised for. But in 2025, we live our whole lives through HCI (for better or worse), and what has constantly been overlooked and under-prioritised is the actual experience of this human-computer interaction, both from the point of view as an end-user experiencing something on a device, and as someone who is crafting that end-user experience on a device.
I speak from experience that as a web developer, it can be challenging to create really great experiences and human-computer interactions when you’re constantly moving between different layers of abstraction and relative obscurity (e.g. design → code as text → user interfaces). Visual development frameworks are a tool to help us get the same outcomes as writing traditional text-based code, without the slow up-front time-costs.
My next step
I'm excited to announce that I have joined toddle.dev as Head of Developer Education.
toddle is a visual development framework. Using toddle, you can create fully-interactive front end websites and apps with any APIs, all via an in-browser visual interface. toddle puts human-computer interaction at the front and centre of what you’re building, for both you as a web developer and your end users. And I'd like to go so far as to say that programming in a different way might actually help you understand some programming concepts in a deeper way. Plus, you’ll never have to configure Webpack again.
The team at toddle is also working hard to make toddle fully open source in 2025 and you can check out the progress towards this on GitHub.
It’s early days, but I’m incredibly excited to help shape the future of toddle, and to help you build the best human-computer interactions on the web you possibly can. If you want to keep up with what we’re working on at toddle, subscribe to the toddledev channel on YouTube and join the toddle Discord (it’s very active!), and I can't wait to build more silly websites using toddle, for your entertainment.
Top comments (0)