Informational websites and web portal used to dominate the web until the last decades. The emergence of sophisticated web application building tools has led us to web apps, which although are still sandboxed inside a web browser’s environment, they are as feature-full as a full-fledged desktop or mobile application.
Today’s, web is build upon modern web technologies. They are developed on full-stack web application frameworks, uses a pre-complier for CSS tables and are making a move towards NoSQL from RDBMS. A part of credit, of course, goes to HTML5 and CSS3.
Let’s take a look at what are the technologies that are dominating web development scene today.
CSS made easy
CSS wasn’t actually designed for what we use it today for. No doubt, progress has been made in this direction with rapid browser innovation sand introduction of CSS3 and beyond. Essentially, we rely on CSS techniques that are, for all purposes and intents, hacks. The float function, for example, was developed to line up an image within a piece of text. Nothing more. Today, we use that function to lay out entire interfaces.
Thus, there is an urgent need of CSS extension language like Less and Sass
Less
A CSS extension language, Less extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, functions, and functions and operations. Less can runs on the server-side with Rhino and Node.js or client-side with a modern browser like Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Influenced by Sass and originally written in Ruby, modern Less is written in JavaScript, Less lets real-time compilation via less.js by the browser.
Sass
With Sass, change a color in your stylesheet and the entire stylesheet will reflect that change. In CSS, this is way hectic. You have to find and replace the value multiple times.
Web Development Frameworks
Web development is of three types: front-end development, back-end development, and full-stack development. Front-end development, as the name sounds, deals with the look and feel of a website and target towards users. Back-end development, on the other hand, takes care of the operation of a web application.
Full Stack
Meteor
Meteor is a full-stack, free, open source JavaScript framework used for developing web applications that produces cross-platform code. It works with MongoDB. Meteor employs the Distributed Data Protocol and relies on publish–subscribe model to broadcast data changes to clients without then need to write a synchronization code. Meteor works with its own Blaze templating engine or it can be made to work with Angular or React frameworks.
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is a full-stack, open-source web application framework for writing code in Ruby. As a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, it supports default structures for a database, a web service, and pages and web standards such as XML and JSON for data exchange. For display and user interfacing, it uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Rails is compliant with configuration (CoC), don’t repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.
User Interface
Bootstrap
Bootstrap is a powerful UI framework to develop responsive web applications and has an extensive popular front-end component library. From quick prototypes to entire web apps and support for Sass variables and mixins, Bootstrap contains HTML- and CSS-based design templates for typesetting, webforms, buttons, navigation, and other UI components.
React.js
React makes creating interactive UIs an effortless experience. A designer just has to create a view for each instance of the application and React will update and render the components when the data it displaying changes, which makes the code predictable and simpler to debug. React is a JavaScript library. Facebook, Instagram and a community of independent programmers and designers maintain it.
React is the framework to select when a developer wants to develop interactive web-applications change instances or view without the need of reloading the page.
Frontend
Angular.js
AngularJS is to web apps what HTML is to websites. A developer with client-side JavaScript can implement declarative templates with data-binding, MVW, MVC, dependency injection and great testability story.
A front-end web application framework maintained by Google and a community of independent code contributors and testers, Angular JS is the solution to the challenges faced by developers in building single-page web applications.
Ember.js
Ember’s Handlebars integrated templates update whenever the underlying data do, which decreases amount of efforts a developer has to put, saving his time making minor choices by incorporating common idioms so that the developer concentrates only the part of web application that matters.
Ember.js is based on the Model–view–viewmodel (MVVM) pattern, and like Angular.js lets developers to build scalable single-page web applications without writing redundant codes.
Ember powers Groupon, LinkedIn, Twitch.tv and Chipotle.
Server-side
Node.js
Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Node.js‘ package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.
Node.js allows JavaScript for server-side scripting in addition to its traditional role in client-side scripting. That is, a developer can use Node.js to run server-side scripts to build dynamic websites’ content before a user’s web browser renders the website’s components and show it in order. Node.js lays foundation stone to the paradigm “JavaScript everywhere” paradigm. It means doing web application development with JavaScript only, rather than a combination of different server-side and client-side language.
Modern Databases
NoSQL databases are much more powerful than relational databases, which struggles with a wide variety of data types and sources, including data from mobile devices, IoT devices, wearables, and sensors.
Object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) also carries various advantages to relation database management system (RDBMS)
MongoDB
MongoDB is a document database that is scalable and flexible to facilitate quick querying and indexing. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB, unlike MySQL, stores data in JSON-like documents which allows the fields to vary from document to document; data structure can also change. Ad hoc queries, quick indexing, and instantaneous aggregation open gates for renewed ways to access and analyze your data.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, or Postgres, an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS), puts emphasis on extensibility and compliance. Postgres is damn scalable can work from small single-machine applications to large Internet-facing applications with many parallel users. PostgreSQL is the default database on macOS server, ACID-compliant, transactional, and supports expendability: updatable views and materialized views, triggers, foreign keys; supports functions and stored procedures.
The bottom-line
The bottom line is that web trends will rise and fall, incited by the evolution of web technology such as JavaScript and the role it is playing in today’s web world and the loss of CSS, which was only a decade ago was everything frontend development was about.
These developments can be employed to both lure and involve new and current users when applied promptly. That is why it is significant to look to the future now for concepts and motivation to take an edge on competition.
About The Author
Patel Nasrullah
Patel Nasrullah is a co-founder at one of the Top mobile app development Company USA, Peerbits. He devotes his time in inspiring young leaders to take the leap of faith. With the experience of 10 years in Web and App development, he now gives full attention to the enterprise by offering mobility solutions about the strategic planning and execution. Connect me @ Twitter, Linkedin & Facebook.
