Where does Front-End Engineering exactly lie in the scope of technology?
I started to gather my answer in a top-down approach. Starting at the root - Computer Science and its immediate section - Applied Computer Science (^1).
Applied Computer Science aims at identifying certain Computer Science concepts that can be used directly in solving real world problems. It is further divided into 11 different concepts as shown below.
Applied Computer Science ├ Artificial intelligence ├ Computer architecture and engineering ├ Computer graphics and visualization ├ Computer security and cryptography ├ Computational science ├ Computer Networks ├ Concurrent, parallel and distributed systems ├ Databases and information retrieval ├ Health Informatics ├ Information science ├ Software engineering
The only sections where I think Front-End plays a role is mostly in the areas of Information Science and Software Engineering. These two concepts are vast at this level but this is so much separated from the rest.
This post is still in process of being complete in terms of having a clear position of front-end engineering in technology.
[edit: 08/18/2013]
Software engineering because front-end has quite a number of languages (and many more being built over them) on its belt, fully capable to build a functional software. Front-end projects run through all the known concepts like waterfall and agile models, have mature sub-disciplines of software engineering like software design, testing and quality assurance.
Though front-end technologies under software engineering umbrella is not where the magic is, its Information Science.
Information Science is an interdisciplinary field where computer science plays only a part role. It applies computer science concepts to the lifecycle of information until it is consumed. As the information reached to the end of its lifecycle just before it is consumed, it is organised in a form and is delivered in a way that is intuitive to people.
The way I see it, ever since computer was invented, Internet found the most accelerating driving force for civilisation. It has connected the world in a way that there is no going back. All of sudden information took over anything else in field of computers. Content took priority over implementation details and websites became the new books, distributed to rest of the world faster than communication mediums seen before. Browsers ran the websites and with increasing devices amongst us, was born a set of technologies that dealt with a new problem - how should information be delivered to people. We can call this new problem and ongoing solution, all to form Front-End Engineering. It sounds like to carry a decent purpose along with it. One of the reasons I get up everyday.
1. Computer Science on wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science