Trying to keep up with web design trends is hard since it’s such a fast evolving field. Hardly a week goes by without the release of a new JS framework,elaborate build tool or testing suite â all of them touted as the one to learn.
Sorting the wheat from the chaff from the genuinely useful is no mean feat,so my aim in this article is to summarise some of the most interesting things going on in web development in the last year,and what things we expect to see more of in 2019
Looking Back on 2018: SPA,CSS Grid,and Speed Single Page Applications (SPAs) saw a leap in popularity in 2018.
A simple idea made possible by the power of modern Javascript,a SPA loads a page once then never reloads it or navigates to another page; instead,Javascript is used to alter the DOM and show new layouts in the browser.
It can provide a much better experience to the user and really change the responsiveness of a site. It’s an idea that’s been popular for a while but really saw a lot of developer engagement last year.
It’s fair to say that when HTML and CSS were created,they were not designed to handle the modern web. Thus,CSS preprocessors and libraries are everywhere,because they provide a more abstract,convenient interface.
2018 brought the widespread adoption of a native CSS grid,supported by all major browsers; a fantastic deal for headache-free aligning.
Backend Changes Expected in 2019:
So,what are some of the backend/server-side changes we can expect to see in 2019.
Containers
Containers are certainly not a new thing,but it’s a thing which is growing so fast that you have to check out. Today,rapid deployment is the thing you need,which means your backend/server has to have,repeatable environment. The idea here is to make development,testing,and production seamless.
Serverless computing
Serverless computing allows you to write and deploy code without ever touching the underlying infrastructure. Anyone who has deployed a website after manually setting up servers,load balancers,you will understand how much time configuring infrastructure can take.
Frontend Changes in 2019.
Vue.
Vue’s remarkable recent success is set to continue. It’s done so well because it implements exactly what developers want,in a very lightweight package.
Is this the death of server-side rendering? In the past,the standard way to create a website was to render all the files server-side before sending them to the user,using PHP and ASP.
Then Javascript frameworks/libraries started benig used,slowly at first,then in a rush. More and more parts of web applications moved client-side over the months,and now it’s common practice to create a Single Page Application entirely in the browser.
That doesn’t mean that server-side rendering isn’t used today,far from it; many new applications continue to use it because it fits well with their needs. However,while server-side rendering is conceding ground now,it’s still a good fit for a large number of sites so it is not going anywhere for the time being.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA).
There are some interesting data on apps vs websites on mobile devices. Whilst mobile sites receive about 12x as many visitors as apps,users spend roughly 20x longer on apps than mobile sites. So what if there was a way to get the user engagement of an app without the friction of using one?
A Progressive Web App,or PWA,is simply a name for a website which fulfills a set of needs and best practices,predominantly for mobile use. PWAs should load reliably and load fast,with snappy navigation and identical feel to a native app.
They are designed to be added to the home screen of mobile devices and are capable of operating offline. Google is a big fan of PWAs; Chrome automatically prompting users to add a website to their mobile home screen if it meets the PWA criteria.
2019 is set to be an interesting year for web developers and users,with exciting changes both at the front-end and back-end.
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