Top 10 Web Technologies and Trends
The software development industry is heavily focused on web development in this century because of its capability to deliver better user experience, ease in delivering updates, maintenance and highly reliant systems on the enterprise level. We will be discussing the top 10 web technologies and trends that are being used in web development to resolve conventional software development problems and increasing productivity. Although microservices architecture and service-oriented architecture are also worth mentioning since these topics are purely architectural concepts and styles so we haven’t covered them in this blog.
Top 10 Best Web Technologies and Trends
So without further a due let’s dive into our list of top 10 web technologies and trends:
1. Backend technologies
Java, .Net, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails and Node js (javascript runtime environment) are the most popular backend technologies that are being used by web developers throughout the world. The web developers usually work with frameworks that are based on these technologies which help them to code faster with higher levels of abstraction. Java has spring, spring boot, GWT, groovy, grails, Vaadin, blade and more. Likewise, PHP has Magento. WordPress, Shopify, cake PHP, Laravel and more.
2. Frontend technologies
Angular, React js and Vue js are the most popular frontend frameworks. All three frameworks are based on javascript on a lower level whereas angular has an abstraction of typescript from its 3rd version onwards.
Angular is a framework based on typescript and supports Ecmascript, a global JavaScript standard which helps in complete backward compatibility. Angular follows the MVC(Model View Controller) pattern in which model, view, controller are separated which eliminates the dependency and enables faster development of web applications. In the MVC pattern, only the smaller changes are reflected instead of the conventional method of updating the entire model, this helps in faster rendering at a considerably low amount of processing power.
React js is a javascript based frontend development library. React js is based on Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) and it uses JSX syntax for writing the code. The DOM formation in react js is virtual not the real one like angular which reduces the processing load while rendering.
Vue js supports both javascript and typescript, it completely depends on the developer which one to use. The DOM formation in Vue js is virtual just like react. In short Vue js is a frontend framework technology in which the best from angular and react js has been extracted to put together in one place.
3. Databases
In conventional centralized software applications, the SQL databases used were complex but appeared to be simpler because the same technical concepts were being used globally to build applications. Whereas in distributed systems the fundamental ideology of ACID(Atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability which ensured consistency in database transactions) could not be fulfilled for SQL databases. Hence different types of databases were developed which work on different principles and ideologies.
There are 4 types of databases i.e. key-value, document, column family and graph used in distributed systems. Out of these four only graph type databases are ACID compliant. Whenever an enterprise system is built as a distributed system then according to use case multiple types of databases are used in conjunction to ensure consistency with transactions.
4. Software tools to design, build, document, and use RESTful web services
The communication of frontend and backend is done via APIs in service-oriented architecture whereas in microservices architecture things pursue on a more granular level where even the communication between modules is done through services via APIs.
In such large-scale applications, it is often observed with teams that they have different visions and requirements for an API. To resolve this conflict the teams discuss the requirement before building it but even then the structure and data need to be visualized and tested easily. Nowadays for designing, building, documenting and testing APIs software tools such as swagger and postman are being used everywhere.
5. Service Management and tracking technologies
The services need to be containerized, deployed over multiple instances, communicate with each other and track the errors if any are observed in a microservices architecture. To do so you need various tools that help you ensure that you have a highly reliant enterprise system that is capable of handling enormous amounts of user activity.
RabbitMQ, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Logstash, Graylog, fabric8, Apache Openwhisk, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Istio, Prometheus, New Relic, Trace, Grafana, Spark are some of the most popular technologies that are being used widely in building and deploying mobile and web applications that are built over microservices architecture.
6. Containerization and Container Orchestration technologies
Containerization and Container Orchestration technologies are a boon for the IT industry. The code and builds of web projects are platform-dependent where specific versions of multiple files and tools are required to run that project. Whenever a developer has to start working on a project or that project has to be deployed over a server then these people need to do the complete installation process which is a tedious and time-consuming process. To achieve independence containerization(containerization is a virtual environment which is a subset of virtual machines that are complete operating systems installed within a system) is done. Nowadays DevOps and web development teams do the setup on this virtual environment once and then they can use it over any operating system just running these containers. Such a practice saves hundreds to thousands of hours in web development and deployment over the cloud.
In microservices architecture, multiple projects are deployed over multiple containers and server instances so to manage those dozens of containers or dockers container orchestration technology such as Kubernetes is used.
7. Machine Learning technologies and software libraries
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence where computers are fed with historical data to train a model that can work autonomously in similar use cases. Training machine learning models require enormous amounts of data that’s why not everyone will be able to achieve very intelligently machine learning models. To solve this problem cloud providers such as AWS, Google and other service providers offer highly trained and easy-to-deploy models such as AWS comprehend which analyses sentiments of text, AWS recognition to detect faces, or compare them.
For training their own machine learning models they can use top technologies such as TensorFlow, Keras, sci-kit-learn, Microsoft cognitive toolkit, theano, Caffe, torch, accord.net, and many others.
8. RPA
Robotic process automation is a business process automation technology where anyone can automate repetitive manual tasks easily with software. The repetitive manual tasks can be like pulling data from multiple IoT devices adding to an excel sheet then submitting to an enterprise system, with RPA the tasks which eat up dozens of working hours could get completed in minutes. These software tools get integrated into the backend and frontend of applications to analyze repetitive processes with their AI models. The suitable processes are then prioritized and automated through programmatic bots created with these tools.
UIpath, blue prism and automation anywhere are some of the most popular tools that are being used throughout the IT industry.
9. Business process automation with workflow engines
Business process automation is a technology in which complex business processes can be automated and modified quickly. In simple words the flow of the application is dynamic and it can be altered by admins in that system.
The workflow of data and processes can be derived through business rules management systems and decision models and notation. Drools, JBoss, jBPM, Red hat decision-makers are some of the technologies that are used to create workflow systems. The enterprise systems such as Salesforce, Appian, Zoho people, Jira that are recognized as pioneers also use BPA and BPM because they enhance the dynamic behavior of applications exponentially with ease from a user perspective.
10. Data Analytics and visualization tools
“Data is the new gold for this era” is a proverb that you must have heard at least once in your life but how can we extract useful information from such enormous data sets. The first step is to clean, structure the data and then display it with various types of charts to showcase uncharted relationships. To do so we have data analytics and visualization technologies on desktop as well as web applications.
Tableau, Qlik Sense, Excel, Power BI, SAS, Apache Spark, Google analytics, Splunk and Grafana are some of the most powerful tools that are being widely used these days.
To perform data cleansing more effectively top technologies such as python and R programming are being used these days.
All the above-mentioned tools are capable of visualizing the data but if someone wants to visualize data then they can use data visualization libraries.
We hope this blog helps in enlightening you about the complexity and tech stack used in building enterprise systems. If you have any questions do let us know, the solutions architect and tech leads at Decipher Zone Software will be happy to help.
