The current hottest trends in web development

1. Artificial intelligence

Whenever you talk about the future of technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is always high on the agenda. But right now, I think it is actually justified. A lot of advances have been made in the field of AI in the last year.

AlphaGo, a program built by Google DeepMind, became the first program to beat a professional Go player.

Some of the biggest tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta (formerly Facebook), have been releasing their AI technology to be used by the public. Artificial intelligence is already used by large applications, either to improve search engines, like in Google’s case, or in Wikipedia’s case to identify inaccurate or damaged articles. It effectively underpins all of Meta’s plans for the metaverse, whatever your opinions on that are.

With easier access to the necessary tools for AI development, we can expect developers to start using AI in new and different ways in the new year. What’s more AI already features heavily in data analytics, so expect the rest to follow suit.

One such example is AI-driven website creation. For example if you sign up for The Grid, your AI web designer Molly will ask you questions about branding, colors, layout and content, and then, based on pre-programmed algorithms, automatically create an aesthetic website for you. You can ask Molly to update the website as many times as you like, until you get it just right. (All the while contributing to the machine’s learning.)

In fact, another sign of AI as a trend is the success of The Grid itself—it’s currently sunsetting V2 and preparing to launch a new one sometime in 2023.

2. Low-code and no-code tools

To be honest, I initially had a dilemma about whether to include this as one of the trends. Surely the success of low-code and no-code tools will be encouraging fewer people to learn to code, right?

Not exactly.

While the continued rise of these tools is in part an answer to the same coding skills gap that make web development a lucrative career salary-wise, the computers are not coming to take your jobs. In fact, we would actually still need to train the developers to operate the LC:NC tools anyway.

These tools will help smaller companies get development (and design work) work done faster, but they are by their own nature not scalable yet. That said, the low-code market is projected to hit 148.5 billion dollars by 2030, so watch this space.

3. Internet of Things (IoT)

Long heralded as the future, internet of things is a movement where typically non-internet-connected objects are given network connectivity in order to send and receive data.

These objects can range from your toaster or kettle, to sensors on motors or embedded in concrete to detect cracks and weaknesses. Anyone who owns an Amazon Alexa, Phillips Hue light, or Google Nest knows what I’m talking about.

Web developers may not be directly involved in the creation of such devices, with UI designers working more heavily through voice user interfaces. However, it’s likely we’ll be involved in the development of applications that use, analyse and display the devices’ data. Companies such as Xively and BugLabs have already started working on APIs that can be used by developers to communicate with IoT devices.

Though IoT brings a lot of opportunity for innovation, some concerns have been raised, especially around security. No doubt web developers will have interesting challenges to face—helping to protect our fittings and furnishings from hackers.

4. AI Chatbots

While again, these may have been around in one guise or another in recent years, expect this area of work to become a huge growth area in 2022.

The reason for this is that the accuracy and usability of these chatbots has seriously increased and become more sophisticated, giving companies far more opportunities to employ them. In fact, SEMRush predict a growth rate of 33.2% year-on-year from 2020 to 2027.

In terms of the technology behind them, opportunities for backend developers are plenty, as they require complex information retrieval, language processing, and machine learning systems to flourish. Web developers fluent in machine learning languages such as Java, R, and Python will find themselves with a whole host of opportunities and interesting projects to get to grips with.

In terms of whether this trend will be a longer-lasting one, it’s easy to see that this is one of them. Not only will companies save money on employing customer support staff, these positions became increasingly harder to fill during the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning that they will save on recruitment costs as well.

5. Angular 15 and beyond

Back in 2016 a different version of Angular came out, and with it came a lot of changes —Google’s frontend JavaScript framework has been completely redesigned.

It now takes advantage of JavaScript ES6’s features, applications are written in TypeScript, and they now moved towards a more component driven architecture.

Along with backwards compatibility, Angular now has a more defined and regular release schedule. With Version 14 released in late 2022, the team intend to upgrade it twice a year, which means that we’re sure to see a lot more changes in this widely popular framework in 2023.

Learn more about how to choose when to deploy Angular vs React for your projects.

6. Yarn package manager

Package managers are incredibly popular tools, especially in the frontend JavaScript communities.

They make it easier for developers to install, update, configure and uninstall code modules within their applications. They do so by communicating with a registry of code modules and manage the various dependencies code modules usually have.

The most popular JavaScript package managers are NPM and Bower. However, a new package manager has been developed by Meta, in collaboration with Exponent, Google and Tilde. We expect its popularity to grow.

Yarn aims to address issues Meta had experienced with NPM, particularly in areas such as performance, security, and consistency. This new package manager still has access to the NPM and Bower registries.

For example, when using NPM, depending on the order in which modules are installed, developers might end up with two different versions of a particular module in their local development environment. This can cause issues where everything works fine on one developer’s machine but not on another’s. To address this issue, Yarn uses lockfiles to tie modules to a specific version within a project, thus assuring that the same version is installed on all developers machines.

7. Static website generators

Static website generators create websites from plain text, usually stored in files and not in databases. In certain situations, static websites built by generators such as Jekyll allow for some advantages.

These include such as increased speed, security, ease of deployment and their handling of traffic surges.

However, they have no real time content or user content (such as comments), which have become a “must” on the web today. As Content Delivery Networks and APIs become more and more the way of life of the web and make it easier for content and templates to be deployed, many devs think static site generators might be an interesting area to watch in the coming year.

Separating the templates and markup from the “full-stack” way of thinking might just make static site generators the “it” thing again.

8. Web design evolution

If you’re interested in design, here are a few trends to watch out for next year:

1. Movement based interfaces will probably become a staple on the web. Perhaps when combined with libraries such as tracking.js, interfaces that respond to hand movements could be closer than we think.

2. CSS container queries are going to become incredibly popular in responsive web design (RWD).

3. Bolder and larger typography is likely to become more prevalent.

4. People often want engaging and compelling ways to get their information quickly. This will likely elicit a rise in the use of videos and other storytelling visuals.

Source : https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/web-development/8-biggest-trends-in-web-development-trends/

The other option is to hire designers at a more affordable rate. There are many companies out there that offer web design services at an affordable price.