The period of the rapid development of the web is behind. Today, we are witnessing the stabilization of frameworks, approaches, and the JavaScript language itself. And this means that investment in education is becoming more meaningful and long-term.
Among the Web frameworks, three leaders have emerged, which are React, Angular, and Vue. The popularity of React is fueled by the addition of hooks to the framework – something in between the simplicity of components and the complexity of Redux.
Hooks are a promising technology that simplifies code. However, the personal sympathies of most people are on the side of Angular.
They think that this is the most holistic and mature framework that allows you to solve even very complex tasks. At the same time, the number of vacancies on Angular is only slightly less than on React.
As for Vue.JS, its prospects are still in question. There is a lot of hype around it, it is simpler than React and Angular, but serious companies prefer the solutions behind Facebook (React) or Google (Angular) to the development of Chinese specialists – there are not so many vacancies in the market yet.
If we talk about the JavaScript language itself, then its rapid development is also behind. Now, it is changing not so fast. The main trend is the widespread transition to the use of TypeScript – not only in Angular, which was originally based on TypeScript but also in React.
Facebook once tried to promote its alternative to TypeScript – the Flow language, however, not much different from TypeScript, it was much less mature and could not become popular. Reactists appreciated the benefits of typing but gave preference to the well-established TypeScript.
Typing has two big advantages, which are code validation at the time of writing and well-performing autocompletion in a development environment. Both of these greatly increase productivity.
Another thing that many people dream about is the ability to write code for the frontend without translating it into JavaScript. And JavaScript has become the “assembler of the web,” even though it is completely unsuitable for this role – it does not even have typing (the types that are in TypeScript are simply erased at the compilation stage).
It turns out that high-performance code, to work in the browser, translates into JavaScript, losing performance.
The WebAssembly project also appeared, which aims to execute effective bytecode in the browser instead of JavaScript. That is, potentially we get the opportunity to write code, say, in C, translate it into WebAssembly bytecode and connect it to JavaScript, greatly improving performance.
However, benchmarks show that high performance cannot be achieved: the code in WebAssembly is fast, but the JavaScript-WebAssembly bundle itself creates overhead that overrides the benefits of lower-level code.
Probably someday it will be possible to develop applications entirely on WebAssembly, but so far the WebAssembly code does not have, say, access to the DOM, and, therefore, its capabilities are limited.
Java development trends
The world of Java has not changed so rapidly for a long time, but this is the advantage – your investment in learning Java will be relevant for a long time. Now Oracle launches a new version every six months: the latest is the Java 13, even though most projects work with Java 8, or even more ancient. But in terms of the number of new features, these are rather minor releases, and in Java 10–13 there are not so many new ones.
The main trends in Java development are the transition to reactive asynchronous programming and the growing popularity of Kotlin as a convenient and powerful alternative to Java, as well as the growing popularity of microservices and the transition to cloud architecture. The latter is no longer very new but continues to capture the world of industrial development: more and more applications are moving to the cloud infrastructure due to the low cost of ownership and the ability to quickly and easily scale as needed.
Fortunately, there is now a large selection of cloud solutions and ready-made cloud services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Another bright trend in the development of artificial intelligence technologies is associated primarily with the success of deep learning neural networks. Most likely, we are expecting an explosive growth of intellectual services based on pattern recognition, working with texts in natural languages, processing of photo and video materials, as well as recommendation services and decision-making systems.
Today, many cloud platforms offer intelligent systems for pattern recognition, speech, translation, speech synthesis, and other similar tasks, and since the quality of such services promises to grow, they will find wider application in real tasks. Thus, it is possible that shortly it will not be necessary to enter information into the computer using the keyboard and mouse – we will just communicate with the system in human language.
In turn, neural networks become especially effective if trained on large data sets, and this is achieved thanks to progress in the field of big data. So, it became possible to collect very large amounts of data, store them, reject incorrect ones, process, and receive training samples.
All this is supported by modern tools written in Java (Hadoop) or Scala (Spark). The most popular machine learning library remains Google’s TensorFlow (Python, C ++).
Finally, another trend is the growing popularity of messaging systems. This is a continuation of the trend of reactive programming, but in a globally distributed format, when counterparties are located not within the same virtual machine, but distributed over the network.
In ordinary life, we also observe a transition to messaging, preferring not to call, but to send messages: the call takes us away from current affairs, and you can answer the SMS message when it is convenient. The same is true in business systems.
If a regular method call is like a phone call, then using message brokers is like sending a letter or SMS. That is, it allows you to more evenly distribute the load of systems and respond to requests as much as possible (for which there are message queues).
The most famous messaging systems are RabbitMQ and Kafka, and it seems that their popularity will continue to grow. Whereas the classic JMS will begin to lose ground.
Melisa Marzett is a freelance SEO content writer who is currently working for cheap essay services. She has an amazing opportunity to work and travel, which makes her to discover something new constantly, gains, and shares experience with her readers. Also, she is a movie enthusiast and enjoys making film reviews. She is a person of moods but always finishes up what she has started.
