Results of 2015: web development
Representatives of CROC, Traffic Inspector, WebMoney Transfer and Softline told what brought 2015th year to the field of web development. Experts listed the most important industry events and noted the main trends of the year.
2015 is the year of approval of the HTTP / 2 standard (the previous version of the protocol was adopted in 1999). This is the year of the mass transition to the HTML-5 standard from obsolete Flash, which is no longer supported by most modern browsers. This is the year of the WebAssembly, which in the future will allow transferring applications that are demanding to performance to the Web, which, according to Sergey Dorogin, a leading development engineer of the Information Technology Department of CROC, means “the beginning of a new world”.
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Most of the trends of the year in the field of web design are associated with the growing popularity of gadgets and the proliferation of the mobile Internet. Among them, such as the use of adaptive layout instead of creating a separate mobile version of the site. One of the main trends is the minimalistic design set by Apple, besides this, experts predict the long-playing popularity of material design from Google.
In 2015 , the ECMAScript 2015 standard (formerly ECMAScript 6) was finally adopted . The previous JavaScript standard (ECMAScript 5) was adopted as early as 2009. Despite the lack of support in older browsers, using Babel such transpilers as transporters, it is possible to develop new applications for ECMAScript 6 now.
Speaking of programming languages, it is impossible not to note the rapid development and distribution of TypeScript. If earlier it was one of many “languages ​​compiled in JS”, ​​along with the same CoffeeScript, now the language is becoming more common. The transition of the Angular development team to TypeScript is an extra confirmation.
The last, probably, 5 years, there was a rapid explosion of technology of transpilers, and JavaScript began to be called “assembler for the Web”. And although JavaScript itself is also developing as a language - the ECMAScript 6 mentioned and ECMAScript 7 already on the horizon, the “javascript as assembler” direction is developing rapidly. We already had asm.js, JS, optimized in terms of performance. But in 2015, a “real assembler for the Web” appeared - WebAssembly is a binary bytecode that browsers (and not only) can perform. In the future, WebAssembly will allow a large number of performance-demanding applications to be transferred to the Web. This is truly the beginning of a new world.
Regarding the development of the Web as a platform for demanding applications, it is worth remembering the Curiosity rover simulator released this year, created by NASA on the Blend4Web engine (by the way, Russia) using WebGL technology.
The Node.js platform, “javascript on the server,” also developed rapidly in 2015. At the beginning of the year, io.js separated from Node.js in order to “develop faster”. But then they united to the joy of everyone. And now Node.js offers at the same time two branches of releases: “stable” and “very stable” (for long-term support). Big changes happened in npm, the package manager for Node.js. Now it has become much easier to use it for front-end projects.
In the context of Node.js, one can not but say about Electron (Atom Shell) - a framework based on Node.js and Chromium, originally created by GitHub for the Atom text editor. Now Electron is used to create cross-platform applications on Web-based technologies. Such, in particular, as Slack and Visual Studio Code.
Open Source walks on the planet . Large companies, fighting for the love of developers, are discovering more and more technologies: Microsoft - JavaScript engine from Edge (Chakra), Visual Studio Code, Apple - Swift, Google - Dart.
Since Microsoft announced the opening of .NET, a year has passed and CoreCLR and ASP.NET5 have reached RC status .
Also 2015 is the year of approval of the HTTP / 2 standard . It allows you to speed up the download and reduce the load on the server. The main modern browsers already support HTTP / 2. And now it's up to the protocol implementation on the servers.
Of the trends worth noting the widespread distribution of Docker containers (both for deployment and for builds). As well as the announced support for it in Windows Server 2016.
The main trends of web development, from my point of view, are related to the development of new telecommunication technologies and devices (mobile Internet distribution, new smartphones, tablets, etc.), and, first of all, they are tied to the user interface, so:
The final transition to the standard HTML-5 . It can be argued that it has been working for a long time, but the massive transition of the “population” occurred in 2015.
The use of adaptive layout , applicable to one site, instead of creating a mobile version of the site (this trend, I think, will still be in fashion for a long time).
Tiled design (founded by Microsoft and its Windows 8), to be honest, has been developed thanks to the mobile Internet, the layout of the tiles can be conveniently adapted to various devices and screen resolutions.
Flat and minimalistic design (Apple has contributed here). Initially, the concept of flat design is to abandon skekeomorphism - the illusion of a three-dimensional image or object, which is achieved by creating reflections, textures, shadows, and creating a so-called flat design using the simplest monochrome elements. However, as I suppose, in 2016 the material design introduced by Google will become a trend.
The use of longrids (from the English. "Long read" - long reading) - long interactive pages, convenient for reading on tablets and smartphones ( example ).
The use of vertical or horizontal scrolling is a form of presenting information in which content (text, image) moves in a vertical or horizontal direction. Scrolling does not change the content, it only moves the “camera” ( example ).
Use large backgrounds or videos ( example ).
The parallax effect is a change in the apparent position of an object relative to a distant background, depending on the position of the observer. If it is simpler, the image is formed from several moving layers ( example ).
In 2015, in the field of web development, there was not a revolution, but rather an evolution of existing solutions that have reached a new level, thanks to the support of global IT corporations.
Multiplatform and the growing popularity of gadgets forced most sites to develop mobile versions in the format Responsive Web Design . This is not an innovation of 2015, but right now the concept has come to the fore. In addition, the introduction of RWD already affects the results of search engines, so that Google is pessimizing sites that do not support the correct display on all types of devices. With the widespread introduction of Responsive Web Design, the emphasis from native web applications is shifting towards less than inferior mobile versions of sites.
One of the main trends in web design in 2015 was the Google-announced Material Design Lite kit. He quickly found followers among Russian and international companies that presented updated sites in the spirit of material design. Despite the fact that many sites are now similar to each other and the design has become more concise, accents are placed with the help of micro-animation and micro-interactive elements.
Over this year, quite a few web designers have joined the army of Sketch fans. The application continues to take market share from other graphic editors in the field of interface design. User interface designers love Sketch for its flexibility, simplicity and speed.
In the field of front-end development, the emergence of Foundation 6, Bootstrap 4 and ReactJS was a notable event .
One more hot topic of the outgoing year can be called microservices - the development style, which implies the use of a set of narrowly oriented services instead of a monolithic application. Microservices have been developed as a result of the booming popularity of Docker container technology, which, in turn, allows you to quickly organize the deployment of individual parts of the application in an isolated environment. This has revolutionized the approach to building application architecture.
Web developers point out that Microsoft technologies are finally beyond the Windows ecosystem . This includes, inter alia, the innovation of Microsoft in the new version of ASP.NET, which allows developers using MacOS and Linux platforms to work on Microsoft technologies (asp.net and c #).
The Go programming language has gained great popularity in professional circles; with its help, it has become much easier to develop high-load web applications and services. The language is developed by Google and, in the opinion of the expert community, has great potential.
Not everything that was supposed to have come true. The predictions about the death of web programming turned out to be false due to the widespread need to implement non-standard solutions that require deep knowledge of technology.
The final "death" of the Macromediaflash technology (just thanks to html-5) was both predicted and come true.
Year after year it is predicted that web programming will die , because there will be design programs that will allow a person to create websites without any knowledge of any technologies. As we can see, such services are evolving: if you specify in the search engine “create a website for free constructor”, you can find quite a lot of them. But there is one thing, all these services will kill the market of "amateur developers" who create resources with a basic set of requirements. And the professional development market will live, because The human brain produces, sometimes, such requirements, which can be realized only by one who owns the technology perfectly.
At the moment, we can note the lack of qualified architects of high-load systems. It is these specialists who are most in demand now, since not only the laboriousness of the production solution, but also productivity and ergonomics depend on the design of the technological stuffing and the choice of the technologies themselves, which in one way or another affects the speed of commissioning decisions, and ultimately the performance and speed of return investments that are so important now.
In general, in the field of web development, the outgoing year was not rich in surprises. He showed a natural development of existing solutions, for example, as in the case of the “death” of Flash and the transition to HTML-5, the adoption of the HTTP / 2 protocol and the new JavaScript language standard - ECMAScript 2015. Often the vector was set by the growing popularity of mobile devices and the improvement of telecommunication technologies.
And here you can find a special New Year offer from GeekBrains with a full stack of technologies for the effective start of your web developer’s career and gifts for the new year.
Key events and trends
2015 is the year of approval of the HTTP / 2 standard (the previous version of the protocol was adopted in 1999). This is the year of the mass transition to the HTML-5 standard from obsolete Flash, which is no longer supported by most modern browsers. This is the year of the WebAssembly, which in the future will allow transferring applications that are demanding to performance to the Web, which, according to Sergey Dorogin, a leading development engineer of the Information Technology Department of CROC, means “the beginning of a new world”.
')
Most of the trends of the year in the field of web design are associated with the growing popularity of gadgets and the proliferation of the mobile Internet. Among them, such as the use of adaptive layout instead of creating a separate mobile version of the site. One of the main trends is the minimalistic design set by Apple, besides this, experts predict the long-playing popularity of material design from Google.
Sergey Dorogin, Lead Development Engineer, Information Technology, CROC:
In 2015 , the ECMAScript 2015 standard (formerly ECMAScript 6) was finally adopted . The previous JavaScript standard (ECMAScript 5) was adopted as early as 2009. Despite the lack of support in older browsers, using Babel such transpilers as transporters, it is possible to develop new applications for ECMAScript 6 now.
Speaking of programming languages, it is impossible not to note the rapid development and distribution of TypeScript. If earlier it was one of many “languages ​​compiled in JS”, ​​along with the same CoffeeScript, now the language is becoming more common. The transition of the Angular development team to TypeScript is an extra confirmation.
The last, probably, 5 years, there was a rapid explosion of technology of transpilers, and JavaScript began to be called “assembler for the Web”. And although JavaScript itself is also developing as a language - the ECMAScript 6 mentioned and ECMAScript 7 already on the horizon, the “javascript as assembler” direction is developing rapidly. We already had asm.js, JS, optimized in terms of performance. But in 2015, a “real assembler for the Web” appeared - WebAssembly is a binary bytecode that browsers (and not only) can perform. In the future, WebAssembly will allow a large number of performance-demanding applications to be transferred to the Web. This is truly the beginning of a new world.
Regarding the development of the Web as a platform for demanding applications, it is worth remembering the Curiosity rover simulator released this year, created by NASA on the Blend4Web engine (by the way, Russia) using WebGL technology.
The Node.js platform, “javascript on the server,” also developed rapidly in 2015. At the beginning of the year, io.js separated from Node.js in order to “develop faster”. But then they united to the joy of everyone. And now Node.js offers at the same time two branches of releases: “stable” and “very stable” (for long-term support). Big changes happened in npm, the package manager for Node.js. Now it has become much easier to use it for front-end projects.
In the context of Node.js, one can not but say about Electron (Atom Shell) - a framework based on Node.js and Chromium, originally created by GitHub for the Atom text editor. Now Electron is used to create cross-platform applications on Web-based technologies. Such, in particular, as Slack and Visual Studio Code.
Open Source walks on the planet . Large companies, fighting for the love of developers, are discovering more and more technologies: Microsoft - JavaScript engine from Edge (Chakra), Visual Studio Code, Apple - Swift, Google - Dart.
Since Microsoft announced the opening of .NET, a year has passed and CoreCLR and ASP.NET5 have reached RC status .
Also 2015 is the year of approval of the HTTP / 2 standard . It allows you to speed up the download and reduce the load on the server. The main modern browsers already support HTTP / 2. And now it's up to the protocol implementation on the servers.
Of the trends worth noting the widespread distribution of Docker containers (both for deployment and for builds). As well as the announced support for it in Windows Server 2016.
Andrey Davidovich, managing partner of the Traffic Inspector project:
The main trends of web development, from my point of view, are related to the development of new telecommunication technologies and devices (mobile Internet distribution, new smartphones, tablets, etc.), and, first of all, they are tied to the user interface, so:
The final transition to the standard HTML-5 . It can be argued that it has been working for a long time, but the massive transition of the “population” occurred in 2015.
The use of adaptive layout , applicable to one site, instead of creating a mobile version of the site (this trend, I think, will still be in fashion for a long time).
Tiled design (founded by Microsoft and its Windows 8), to be honest, has been developed thanks to the mobile Internet, the layout of the tiles can be conveniently adapted to various devices and screen resolutions.
Flat and minimalistic design (Apple has contributed here). Initially, the concept of flat design is to abandon skekeomorphism - the illusion of a three-dimensional image or object, which is achieved by creating reflections, textures, shadows, and creating a so-called flat design using the simplest monochrome elements. However, as I suppose, in 2016 the material design introduced by Google will become a trend.
The use of longrids (from the English. "Long read" - long reading) - long interactive pages, convenient for reading on tablets and smartphones ( example ).
The use of vertical or horizontal scrolling is a form of presenting information in which content (text, image) moves in a vertical or horizontal direction. Scrolling does not change the content, it only moves the “camera” ( example ).
Use large backgrounds or videos ( example ).
The parallax effect is a change in the apparent position of an object relative to a distant background, depending on the position of the observer. If it is simpler, the image is formed from several moving layers ( example ).
Konstantin Karataev, a leading Web developer for WebMoney Transfer:
In 2015, in the field of web development, there was not a revolution, but rather an evolution of existing solutions that have reached a new level, thanks to the support of global IT corporations.
Multiplatform and the growing popularity of gadgets forced most sites to develop mobile versions in the format Responsive Web Design . This is not an innovation of 2015, but right now the concept has come to the fore. In addition, the introduction of RWD already affects the results of search engines, so that Google is pessimizing sites that do not support the correct display on all types of devices. With the widespread introduction of Responsive Web Design, the emphasis from native web applications is shifting towards less than inferior mobile versions of sites.
One of the main trends in web design in 2015 was the Google-announced Material Design Lite kit. He quickly found followers among Russian and international companies that presented updated sites in the spirit of material design. Despite the fact that many sites are now similar to each other and the design has become more concise, accents are placed with the help of micro-animation and micro-interactive elements.
Over this year, quite a few web designers have joined the army of Sketch fans. The application continues to take market share from other graphic editors in the field of interface design. User interface designers love Sketch for its flexibility, simplicity and speed.
In the field of front-end development, the emergence of Foundation 6, Bootstrap 4 and ReactJS was a notable event .
One more hot topic of the outgoing year can be called microservices - the development style, which implies the use of a set of narrowly oriented services instead of a monolithic application. Microservices have been developed as a result of the booming popularity of Docker container technology, which, in turn, allows you to quickly organize the deployment of individual parts of the application in an isolated environment. This has revolutionized the approach to building application architecture.
Web developers point out that Microsoft technologies are finally beyond the Windows ecosystem . This includes, inter alia, the innovation of Microsoft in the new version of ASP.NET, which allows developers using MacOS and Linux platforms to work on Microsoft technologies (asp.net and c #).
The Go programming language has gained great popularity in professional circles; with its help, it has become much easier to develop high-load web applications and services. The language is developed by Google and, in the opinion of the expert community, has great potential.
What predictions come true and what doesn't
Not everything that was supposed to have come true. The predictions about the death of web programming turned out to be false due to the widespread need to implement non-standard solutions that require deep knowledge of technology.
Andrey Davidovich, managing partner of the Traffic Inspector project:
The final "death" of the Macromediaflash technology (just thanks to html-5) was both predicted and come true.
Year after year it is predicted that web programming will die , because there will be design programs that will allow a person to create websites without any knowledge of any technologies. As we can see, such services are evolving: if you specify in the search engine “create a website for free constructor”, you can find quite a lot of them. But there is one thing, all these services will kill the market of "amateur developers" who create resources with a basic set of requirements. And the professional development market will live, because The human brain produces, sometimes, such requirements, which can be realized only by one who owns the technology perfectly.
What kind of specialists are missing?
Maxim Andrianov, Head of Softline Solutions Sales:
At the moment, we can note the lack of qualified architects of high-load systems. It is these specialists who are most in demand now, since not only the laboriousness of the production solution, but also productivity and ergonomics depend on the design of the technological stuffing and the choice of the technologies themselves, which in one way or another affects the speed of commissioning decisions, and ultimately the performance and speed of return investments that are so important now.
Summary
In general, in the field of web development, the outgoing year was not rich in surprises. He showed a natural development of existing solutions, for example, as in the case of the “death” of Flash and the transition to HTML-5, the adoption of the HTTP / 2 protocol and the new JavaScript language standard - ECMAScript 2015. Often the vector was set by the growing popularity of mobile devices and the improvement of telecommunication technologies.
PS
And here you can find a special New Year offer from GeekBrains with a full stack of technologies for the effective start of your web developer’s career and gifts for the new year.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/273171/
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