It seems like there is a new language or technology that comes every day. So it can be not very easy to get on top of the web development arena. It will require constant adaptation and learning. It doesn’t matter what your field of choice is, whether it is a front-end, back-end, full-stack, mobile solutions, or web apps, a constant change is inevitable.

So to get along with the requirement, you have to upgrade yourself continually. In this article we are going to discuss Web Development trends and Road map for 2020.

Whatever technology you talk about, one thing will always be valuable, knowing the basics. It is a must-have requirement in any field, and in Web Development, three basics are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Whether you are working on front-end, back-end, or full-stack development, knowing these is still essential. Apart from that, even if you work in any of the departments, you must be aware of what and how teams working on other departments are doing.

Front-end

The responsibility of a Front End Developer is to develop and maintain websites. Keep in mind how the site is appearing, how it is performing, and how the user interaction is happening with it. And also keep upgrading the website using new technologies and trends. React JS, Angular, and Vue are the most trending JavaScript frameworks used for front-end development. Learning any of the three is equally useful, but in terms of growing popularity, React JS is now shadowing Angular, and it would be interesting to see it overtaking angular this year.

Back-end

A back-end developer is a programmer, who writes the core program or logic of a website. He creates all such components and features that run in the background or are indirectly accessed by a user. Nodejs and Python are the two most trending programming languages/frameworks in the back-end developer community. Though NodeJS is a robust framework, Python is gaining popularity due to the growing demand for Machine Learning and AI-supported web apps, and Python fantastically supports these technologies.

Website performance and optimization techniques

Currently, a typical user expects web pages to load within less than 3 seconds. If your website doesn’t meet this expectation, you lose a lot of website traffic and, as a result, your revenue. So website optimization is a must-have skill in web development. Website optimization is a very vast subject and blanket almost every aspect of web development. So it is essential to learn all the tricks and techniques to optimize your website starting at conception.

Microservices

Microservices, also known as Microservices Architecture is an architectural style of developing a single application through a set of small services, which runs in its process and communicate with each other, using lightweight protocols. It is one of the most trending subjects in web development. You can create microservices using different programming languages, but Python is best at it, you only have to understand the process of creating it in Python.

Serverless

Serverless is a type of cloud-computing model in which the cloud service provider runs and manages the server and dynamically manages the allocation of resources. The best part is pricing, which is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, and not on pre-purchased units of capacity. Amazon AWS Lamda, Google Cloud, and Microsofts Azure provide a serverless framework to implement.

Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence

There are various methods through which machine learning and AI are going to improve your website. Artificial intelligence can make web programming more accessible. It can automate multiple essential tasks. Moreover, it can be used to create self-modifying codes from scratch without any human involvement. This helps developers to build smarter apps and bots at a much faster rate than before. AI virtual assistants can provide an enjoyable experience to the end-user. After receiving the valid data, the AI virtual assistants can create personalized content with the required combination of brand, design, layout, and material needed for that end-user.

Testing

Since websites are becoming more sophisticated with the involvement of complex technologies such as microservices, the importance of testing is also growing. It is always essential to write neat and clean code and ensure that your code works properly and doesn’t break. In this competitive scenario, you have to update your web app regularly, and the last thing you would like is your app to stop functioning after an update or bug fix. Manual testing is possible only up to some extent. Still, with more complicated, your web app goes, more features it incorporates it would require automated testing tools such as Selenium, Testcomplete, etc.

Progressive Web Apps and cross-platform Web Apps

At its core, a Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are web application that uses modern web techniques to deliver a native app-like experience to users onto a web page. These are web applications with progressive enhancement to implement features like caching, background sync, and push notifications. It works offline when you don’t have an internet connection, leveraging data cached during your last interactions with the app. Google Docs is the best example of PWA in which documents and spreadsheets can be created, edited, and stored online. Again PWA is not a framework or library; it is an architecture that can be implemented using any framework. Seeing the popularity of PWAs, it can be said that PWAs are going to rule in 2020.

Database

Your web application, whether it is a basic or complex, it would require database storage and management system to store and manage its data. Here are the most common and trending databases for web development:

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB

Responsive Web design

Responsive web design should be given serious consideration in 2020. Not only your website or web app should look good, but it should also be entirely usable on all the devices. So it would be the best practice to start building for mobile devices then gradually upgrade for tabs and desktops.

Web Assembly

We are going to hear more of the Web Assembly in 2020. JavaScript, or any high-level language for that matter, has a fundamental limitation in terms of speed. Whereas Web Assembly is an efficient, low-level byte code generated by languages like C, C++, and Rust, that can be executed by a browser, resulting it to be extremely fast.