Web development in 2022

When speaking of web development trends, it is impossible not to mention SPA. This is not a super fresh trend, but its popularity is not declining but only growing. Let's see why.

What's SPA?
SPA is a web app or website that interacts with users by partially rewriting the current page unlike traditional downloads, where you got a new version of a whole page on each request. Thus, SPA is a page where a lot of data stays the same and only a few elements are updated at a request.

Simply put, SPA only sends what you need with each click, and your browser renders that info. This approach avoids delays and makes the app behave smoothly like a desktop. Moreover, it gains on repetitive content and doesn't waste time with headers, footers, logos, navigation bar, repeating layouts, and templates.

For example, when you browse through your e-mail, you'll notice a bit of change during navigation - the sidebar and header remain untouched as you go into your inbox. By the way, the most popular SPAs now are Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Maps. How do they do it?

How it works?
Let's imagine that the website is a bird. When you want to see a bird - a traditional, multi-page website paints it for you on the server and sends a bird to your browser. Meanwhile, SPA gives you data and content to fill out the template of the bird in your browser. What if you want to see two birds in a cage...

In a traditional website, your request for two birds in the cage causes the server to re-render the whole picture and send it back. But in SPA, the server says, "Hey, bro, I have that for you, but you already have one bird, so keep it, and I'll take care of the second one and a cage. Then it sends you updated instructions for two birds and a cage to generate it. As you might guess, it saves a lot of time and effort. But let's be more specific.

Why so popular?
SPA's puzzle by puzzle client-side method makes load time much faster and cost-efficient. Moreover, SPA has benefits such as:

• Single time file load each HTML, CSS, JS
  
• No extra queries to the server
  
• Fast and responsive front-end
  
• Enhanced app performance and consistency
  
• Simplified architecture
  
• Reduced development time and support costs

SPA is good for making responsive designs for mobile, desktop, and tablet. So, the business understands its advantages and moves to SPA's side.

What's the trend?
The popularity of SPAs highlights a clear development trend - raising the level of abstraction. Today no one wants to worry about whether the website is displayed correctly, or how powerful the client's processor is. We give the browser HTML, and then it makes something beautiful, that will be displayed everywhere, even on the iron, if there is a browser there. In addition, the smarty browser scales everything itself, doesn't change the business logic, and abstracts the application from the hardware.

However, programmers realize that this is not the ultimate dream, and the browser can perform better. SPA was not installed on the device and could not make notifications. To access SPA again, you have to go to the browser, which means that the first drawing time can confuse users. These shortcomings were the necessities for PWA's appearance.

Progressive web app (PWA) is a tandem of browser and cache. PWA gives access to web technologies for cross-platform and provides users with an app-like experience customized for their devices. What inspired programmers to PWA development. Let's identify it.

What inspired PWA?
As we said before, when using SPA, users had to google to find the website again. With PWA we only need a browser and the Internet and nearly 2 free MB to install the needed website. Next time we just need to click on the icon to go to the site. Multi-page websites with their traditional load style used to be more cranky, requiring great Internet and plenty of time. Meanwhile, PWA is cache-friendly and makes the site available offline and faster.

SPA or MPA cannot send a love message to users, whereas PWA has a notification function.

What's PWA concept?
The PWA concept is a logical follow-up of SPA. Thanks for adding the app manifest with startup parameters and application defaults to the SPA, we can tell browsers which files should be saved and which should be replaced. The manifest describes the information needed for NativeCache to work. It has many advantages.

PWA supremacies
PWAs run in browsers, like websites, and have access to the desktop app features. Thus, PWA technology has made all bold dreams come true:

• Discoverability. Search engines and app stores are PWA-friendly
  
• Installability. Click and launch from the home screen or start menu
  
• Engagement. Send notifications even when the app is not running
  
• Internet-independency. Work offline and in low-network states
  
• Scalability. Experience scales up with device capabilities
  
• Responsiveness. Adapts to the user's screen and input method
  
• Linkable. Share and launch from a usual hyperlink

However, despite all the benefits - PWA has some disadvantages. Problems may arise in Apple ecosystem, in which notifications should be sent to Apple, and only after approval, they meet users. To take over iPhone users the solution is to write native applications in languages that were created by Apple for Apple. Or use HTML, JS, and React Native, which works correctly everywhere. That is, for all its great qualities, PWA will not free businesses from the need to develop a mobile app. By the way, there is also an obvious trend for programmers.

What's the trend?
HTML rules. And this is one more global trend. Writing desktop apps in HTML allows us to kill two birds with one shot: such apps work correctly in the browser and are identical to the native application. Such code works everywhere. The universal tendency to simple code and no-code is almost here. So, next in line after PWA are services for creating apps and sites, which allow quickly and easily creating an app, responding immediately to market changes, and creating apps for all OSes at once. Moving on to the next trend.

One of the bright trends, WebAssembly (Wasm). The major objective of Wasm is to facilitate high-performance apps in web browsers. Before Wasm, we suffered because JavaScript is universalized and not typified language that didn't allow the usage of near-native code and all the computing platform power. Google, Microsoft, and Apple developers accepted this challenge and created Wasm. Let's discover its secrets.

What's Wasm?
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary format running in the browser, a virtual machine, and the result of compiling from a high-level language. With it, you can develop high-performance web apps using web technologies and various languages like C, C++, C#, Rust. How does it deal with all problems?

How it works?
You write some code in whatever language and you compile it to Wasm. That code will get compiled to the instruction set of that virtual machine. And then those instructions get stored in a binary format usually in a .wasm file. Because that virtual machine is designed to easily compile to real processors, this file can now be ingested by a runtime, which is most likely the browser. The browser can turn this .wasm file into actual machine code of the actual machine the browser is running on. And then execute this code. So why is Wasm becoming so popular?

Why so popular?
Because it enables near-native performance without plug-ins in all modern browsers, including mobile. Moreover, many languages, including C, C#, Go, and Rust, can compile code that targets the stack-based WebAssembly virtual machine. It also makes running .NET code anywhere, including inside the browser, possible. And these are not all of his tricks. Overall Wasm is cool because:

• secure
  
• open-source
  
• high and predictable performance
  
• reusable backend and runtime
  
• hardware, language, and platform-independence
  
• full featured WebAssembly debugging support

Wasm is very necessary if speed is important (e.g. Photoshop Web), if there are calculations (mining cryptocurrencies), if graphics matter (browser games). Where Wasm is already used today:

WebAssembly usage

1. Games, VR/AR like Godot, Doom 3
   
2. Graphics and 3D editors like Figma, AutoCAD
   
3. Codecs and audio/video filters as FFmpeg
   
4. Databases creation like SQLite.
   
5. Modernization of older apps in Silverlight
   
6. PWA creation

With WebAssembly, we'll get faster speed for compute-heavy apps and a better user experience. So we advise paying attention to this technology as soon as possible. While you consider, we move to the serverless architecture.

What's the trend?
Wasm's global goal is to create a single and free command standard that does not depend on either the code language or the browser but has excellent performance at the same time. Simplification, standardization, and decoupling from limitations are what we see. Go further.

Serverless architecture is a way to build and run apps in the cloud. Why is serverless so trending? Because it solves several annoying problems in one shoot.

Serverless challenges
The traditional physical and software components are expensive to set up, maintain and manage. At the same time, the old-school microservices architecture work on a request-response system, so if there is a bug, the whole app may crash. So, the old approach didn't fit anymore. It was time to come up with something new. Cloud technology is new solution.

Great solutions
By using cloud technology like AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, IBM Open Whisk, the necessity to maintain physical infrastructure and systems software runs away. Besides, in serverless, functions are unidirectional (request or response only) and are queued. So, if there is a bug, the app won't crash, but only one function will fail instead of the whole set. An error in this case is easier to find and correct. Let's see where we can apply this technology.

Where serverless suits best?
Do you want to put your business in the seventh heaven of happiness, but don't know how to start? There are several cases where it is easier and safer to start your serverless journey:

1. Background tasks like asynchronous notifications (push, email, SMS)
   
2. Backends for IoT apps
   
3. User identification by User-Agent, IP and other data
   
4. API endpoints

Not bad! Now move on to the serverless benefits.

Why going serverless?
In the advantages, we can also see the consonance of the global web development trends.

• Complete abstraction. You don't care if your serverless apps run on Linux, Windows, or a self-written OS. All you worry about is the platform's ability to run Python, Java, Ruby code, and related libraries for your language.
  
• Maximum elasticity. Fast scalability from zero to thousands of concurrent functions.
  
• Accessibility for newbies. Understanding 100-500 lines (the usual size of a function in Serverless) is much easier for a new team player than understanding a million lines and relationships.
  
• Pay-as-you-go. If your app is off, you pay nothing because it is not using any resources. You only pay for the time that your application is running.

Some tips from SweetSoft
Some tips from SweetSoft to avoid screwing up: keep in mind that the serverless approach does not mean migrating the whole app in a blink of an eye. The evolutionary method is much better. So start writing functions for non-critical or non-custom-facing parts of your app. Do we think Serverless has a future? Sure. So, consider about applying it to your business to keep up. And we go to the next trend.

CI/CD is a method to frequently deliver apps to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development. It is one of most popular DevOps and agile practices. The main concepts attributed to CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. What problems does it solve and why is it becoming more and more popular?

What is CI/CD?
Specifically, CI/CD introduces ongoing automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of apps, from integration and testing phases to delivery and deployment. Taken together, these connected practices are often referred to as a "CI/CD pipeline" and are supported by development and operations teams working together in an agile way with either a DevOps or site reliability engineering (SRE) approach.

Preconditions for CI/CD
In modern software development, the goal is to have multiple developers working concurrently on different features of the same app. However, if an organization is set up to merge all branching source code on one day (known as "merge day"), the resulting work can be tedious, manual, and time-intensive.

That's because when a developer working in isolation makes a change to an application, there's a chance it will conflict with different changes being simultaneously made by other developers. This problem can be further compounded if each developer has customized their own local integrated development environment (IDE), rather than the team agreeing on one cloud-based IDE. As a result, we are faced with:

• Long response to errors
  
• Mixed responsibility for code
  
• Long feedback loop

Discover how these problems are solved by CI/CD approach.

Problem-solving style
Continuous integration (CI) helps developers merge their code changes back to a shared branch, or "trunk," more frequently - sometimes even daily. Following the automation of builds and unit and integration testing in CI, continuous delivery automates the release of that validated code to a repository. Generally, the main idea of CI/CD suggests that code changes go in small batches with frequent commits. With a well-established integration process, developers are more likely to make frequent commits, which will improve both communication and software quality. Let's find out why CI/CD is so useful.

Why CI/CD?
Little changes are easier to identify bugs, than changes that have been in work over a long time. Besides, working with short commit cycles reduces the probable multiple code changes, which leads to merge conflicts. Besides, CI/CD suggests:

• Quick release of new product functionality features
  
• Pool of code alternatives
  
• Product quality improvement
  
• Fixing and working out bottlenecks

Let's examine what tools are used for CI/CD.

CI/CD tools to apply
Such tools are useful: Jenkins, GitLab, Rex, CircleCI, AWS CodeBuild, Open Build Service (OBS), Azure DevOps, Buildbot, PHP Censor, Atlassian Bamboo, Travis CI. Many teams using CI/CD pipelines in the cloud containers like Docker and systems like Kubernetes. However, we recommend consulting with experts, so as not to waste your time.

To sum up
Check seven times, release once. This is the general idea of CI/CD. So, CI packs, tests build, and alerts developers if something has gone wrong. The CD automatically deploys apps and performs additional tests. You can measure the CI/CD effect in terms of DevOps KPIs. So, to successfully release a web app, you need to be attentive not only to the result, but also to the process. Let's discuss what will help you achieve stunning results in web development.

In short, to avoid red tape with the trends and rules described above. In more detail, getting a completed web project from experienced guys will always be cheaper than:

• hiring specialists
  
• wasting time entering them into the project
  
• training an in-house team
  
• managing the project
  
• keeping office space and equipment

Well-trained teams of skilled web developers are best friends for businesses, because they save their time, effort, money, and patience.

So, outsource your web dev needs, if you want:

1. Start your project with the speed of light
   
2. Work with the best web developers from all world
   
3. Use your resources wisely
   
4. Save your time and money
   
5. Prioritize your business needs right

Outsourcing web development allows the project owner to entrust the whole web dev process to an outsourcing company. In this case, the owner receives the work result of web developers, UI/UX designers, QA, PM. But in some cases, the owner wants to strengthen the team and hire remote IT specialists from other companies using the outstaffing model. Whatever the owner chooses, we are ready to help him.

We are confident that next year will pass under the slogan: the easier and faster, the better. The faster the application is created and the less effort it takes, the greater. The higher the level of abstraction in developing a website or app, the better. The more versatile the web solutions, the better. So keep in mind - to be successful, you should be...

Faster. Simpler. More abstracted.

We hope that our article did not bore you, and now you are ready to arm yourself with web development trends and our tips to get your place in the sun. Surely, web development is one of the most enjoyable things in the world, especially if you choose outsourcing from SweetSoft.