With every passing year, current technologies and concepts get timeworn and new technologies pave the way. As the technology advances, it gets too much ingrained in every aspect of our personal life. We start our day by reading latest news on mobile devices and end it by saying goodbye to everyone through social channels. If you are a web designer or developer, then you must be familiar with the new concepts & trends being introduced in the field of website design and web development.
As 2017 has just started, we have put together some of the anticipated trends for the coming year. We are also suggesting some of the areas of development that you should focus.
Artificial Intelligence: It is expected to see as a future technology as Artificial Intelligence has made lots of advances last year and was high on the agenda. One of the finest achievements of AI made in the previous year was AlphaGo. It is a program built by Google DeepMind on Artificial Intelligence that became the first program to beat a professional Go player.
Artificial Intelligence is already used by Google and Wikimapia to improve their search engine’s performances. The essential tools required to perform AI development are easy to access and it is expected that developers can use AI in some unique ways and are expected to come up some innovative products in the coming year.
One of the finest examples of the use of Artificial Intelligence is AI-driven website creation. The Grid is a medium that works according to your messages and instructions. In this platform, Molly is your AI website designer and will ask you questions regarding the colors, branding, content and layout. Based on pre-programmed algorithms, molly will automatically create an aesthetic website for you. You can update your website as many times as you can by instructing Molly, until you get it just right.
Virtual Reality: It’s true that there were many new announcements related to virtual reality in gadget world last year, but still there was no big VR based product launched in the previous year. There are many big gaming brands that are working hard to come up with VR based gaming product that can sweep the gaming industry. Even Google and Mozilla have started working on APIs to help VR technology evolution to the web. With the increasing technology standards, more and more apps are expected to emerge based on VR technologies. You can also expect to see virtual reality based apps varying from news coverage to virtual real estate tours.
JavaScript in 2017: Many individuals discuss over web development spaces about the new programming language they should learn. It completely depends on the focus and interest of the individual. But according to the study, JavaScript is already in the list of popular programming language due to vivacious ecosystem of frameworks, libraries and technologies. It the most common programming language used by full stack developers. There are several fundamentals of JavaScript that developers need to expertise, such as, ES6, Builtin methods, Functions and pure Functions, Closures, Promises, RAIL, Node, Classes, Callbacks and Express, etc. Apart from this, there are some expected Libraries in Java Script 2017. These include Node.JS, D3.JS, RIOT.JS, Chart.VS, keystone.JS, etc. Amber.JS, VUE.JS, Meteor are few frameworks of JavaScript for 2017.
Internet of Things (IoT): It is a movement where internet connectivity is moving from internet connected devices like desktop and mobile phones to non-internet connected household appliances. These objects can vary from toaster or washing machine, to sensors on motors to detect weaknesses and cracks. The advancement in the technology, there is an increasing demand for the internet to facilitate is to control every aspect of our lives, through apps on our smartphones.
This internet progression may enable us to turn on our heating appliance remotely, set timers on our lights or perfectly time our kettle to get started so that a cup of tea is ready as soon as you get home from work. The role of developer here would not be in creating these appliances; instead, they would be involved in the app development process that uses, analyzes and displays device’s data. Developers may have to face interesting challenges that will help them protect fittings and furnishings from hackers.
Static site generators: Static websites are gaining popularity especially among bloggers and websites offering online content. Static sites ensure low cost and better speed, performance and security. With static site generators, you can convert simple, plain text into a website or static blogs. Bloggers find it easy and interesting way to create their blogs without any need of a database. Moreover, in static sites, your web pages are not complex files and can run on your own servers. This is making static site generators very popular among users. There are lots of other advantages associated with static site generators like website loading times, ease of deployment and better security handling.
Rails 5: The new version of Rails, Rails 5, was released in 2016, but it didn’t gain much popularity in the previous year. Rails 5 is still young and therefore we expect its popularity to grow in 2017. There are some interesting additions on the new release of Rails. These include:
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Turbolinks 5: It allows developers to build Single Page like Applications directly from the Rails stack. It will allow links to obtain full HTML pages, without requiring client-side JavaScript frameworks.
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ActionCable: It is a new method to employ websockets in Rails to make real time applications. It can be used to create notifications and chat features easily.
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The popular rails_api gem is merged into its codebase in new Rails 5. Developers can now effortlessly build API only applications and hook them up to their desired JavaScript or native frameworks.
Read Here: Features of Ruby on Rails 5
Angular JS and Beyond: In 2016, Angular 2 update was introduced, a newly redesigned JavaScript Framework. It has some newly introduced JavaScript ES6’s features, which allows you to write apps in TypeScript and move them towards component driven architecture. Many developers love using this framework because of its compatibility with videos, animations and non-static documents.