Welcome my dear readers, today am going to be writing on how there has been a trend towards shifting of web applications from the backend to the frontend. The backend mostly are now being developed using a simple API, or more APIs depending on the project. This makes the choice of a frontend framework much more important than that of the backend. Now here are the lists of languages and platforms that were updated in 2016 and has widely advanced:
Languages and Platforms
PHP 7 is a major new version that fixes a number of issues and brings new features and speed. PHP 7 is around twice as fast as PHP 5.6, which will have a big impact on large codebases and CMS systems like WordPress and Drupal. And if you need even more speed and dont mind switching to an alternative runtime, check out HHVM (Hiphop Virtual Machine), which Facebook uses and develops to run their website.
Python 3.5 was released 2016 with a lot of new features like Asyncio, which gives you a node.js-like event loop, and type hints. As a whole Python 3 is finally gaining popularity and we heavily recommend it over the older Python 2. Nearly all libraries are available for Python 3 and now is a good time to upgrade your legacy code base.
Swift 2 was released in 2016 and still upgrading. This is Apples vision for a modern programming language that eases the development of apps on iOS and OS X. As of a few weeks ago, Swift is open source and has already been ported on Linux. This means that it is now possible to build backend and server side software with it.
Go 1.5 was released a few months ago, and brought major architectural changes. In 2015 it has grown in popularity and has been adopted in leading startups and open source projects. The language itself is relatively simple, so learning it will be a weekend well spent.
JavaScript also saw updates in the form of the ES2015 standard (used to be known as ES6). It brings us exciting new features and additions to the language. Thanks to most browsers adopting quick release schedules, support for ES2015 is great, and there is Babel.js which will help you bring your code to older browsers.
Typescript is a staticly typed language which compiles to JavaScript. It is developed by Microsoft and has perfect integration with Visual Studio and the open source Visual Studio Code editors. It will soon be quite popular, as the upcoming Angular 2 is written in it. Static typing benefits large teams and large code bases the most, so if one of these applies to you, or you are just curious, you should give Typescript a try.
Node.js saw a lot of changes in 2016 and 2017, with the community splitting between Node.js and io.js, and then joining forces again. As a result we now have an actively maintained project with lots of contributors and two versions of Node a solid LTS (long term support) release, which gives stability for long lived projects and large companies, and a non-lts version which is quick to add new JavaScript features.
You can also try out functional languages like Haskell, Elixir, and Rust etc. If you are looking for a application development job either hybrid applications development or using normal application development languages, you can try out: Java, AngularJs, C#, and also Iconic UI(framework) etc.
Now we go to JavaScript frameworks we can be useful in web application development:
JavaScript Frameworks
JavaScript is a very important piece of the web development architecture, there were two new standards this year Service Workers and Web Assembly, which shape how web apps are developed from now on. There were also a number of new framework releases in 2016 and 2017:
Angular.js has become the go-to JavaScript framework for enterprises and large companies. It has been known for some time that the next major version of the framework was coming, and earlier this year Angular 2 was released as a development preview. It is a total rewrite of Angular 1 and according to us is a great improvement over it. It is almost guaranteed to become the enterprise framework of choice once it is released, and Angular 2 experience will be a great addition to your CV.
React continued its ascend throughout 2015 and has seen new releases throughout the year and new projects adopting it as their library of choice. It shipped new development tools a few months ago. Facebook also released React Native which is a framework for building mobile apps for Android and iOS, which combines a native frontend with React running in a background JavaScript thread.
Polymer 1.0 was released in May 2016. This marks the first stable and production ready version. Polymer is based around Web Components, which is a standard for packaging HTML, JS and CSS into isolated widgets that can be imported into your web apps. Web Components are only supported in Chrome and Opera at the moment, but Polymer makes them available everywhere.
Ember.js also saw a new release. Ember 2 brings modularity and removes deprecated features and optimizes the codebase. Ember follows semantic versioning and maintainers of the framework are careful to make updating as easy as possible. If you need a framework with stability and easy migration to new versions, you can give Ember a try.
Vue.js is a new library that offers reactive components for building user interfaces. It supports data binding, modular components and composition. It is similar to React, but doesnt use a virtual DOM and works only in the browser. In the short time that it has existed, Vue has gathered a very active community around it and is establishing itself as a pragmatic tool for building web interfaces.
Frontend
Bootstrap has become even more popular in the last year and is turning into a web development standard. Version 4 will come out in the next few months, which brings flexbox support and integrates out SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets). It promises a smooth transition from V3 (unlike what we saw with v2 to v3 a couple of years ago), so you can feel confident that what you learn about Bootstrap 3 will be applicable to version 4.
CSS preprocessors continue improving. Less and SASS are the two most popular at the moment, with mostly comparable feature sets. However, the news that Bootstrap 4 is migrating over to SASS gives it a slight edge over Less as the preprocessor to learn in 2017.
MDL (Material Design Lite) is an official framework by Google for building material design web apps. It was released earlier this year and has a similar goal to Googles other framework Polymer, but is much easier to get started with.
Foundation is another frontend framework that is an alternative to Bootstrap. Version 6 was released earlier this year, which focuses on modularity so that you can include only the pieces that you need for a faster load time.
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