Web development is a vital part of every business today, with little to no way to operate outside the digital sphere. Thus, business departments are increasingly aware of new trends and advancements, asking more precise questions about the services to be delivered.
On the other hand, developers see rapid advancement in the technologies they use. This aspect also needs to be reviewed and is expected to change in the year 2023.
That’s why this time there are 5 business trends and 5 tech trends to follow in 2023 regarding web development!
This text covers:
- Serverless Architecture
- Single page apps
- Content personalization
- Merging ecosystems
- Web development consulting and prototyping
- AI in runtime web
- WebAssembly
- New interesting libraries
- Development experience (DX)
- Server components in ReactJS
Click on any of the above to get straight to the point!
Business perspective
Web development services are a tool to solve multiple business problems. Yet these problems vary depending on the company in need of service. On the other hand, there are some general business trends that will emerge in 2023 as dominant in web development.
Serverless architecture
Serverless architecture is basically an approach that allows an app to run without having to manage the underlying architecture. It is all up to the cloud provider to deliver all required resources and power to ensure the app’s operations.
From the business perspective, a serverless architecture gives the developer access to tools that ensure service availability regardless of the traffic, the interest, or the spikes thereof. Thereby , risk of losing profits and hurting the brand due to service being unavailable. On the other hand, the approach mitigates the risk of overpaying for infrastructure that is underused.
Single page apps
A single-page app is a system that interacts with the user in real-time without the need to reload the browser. The single-page app approach is the new normal and will not stop being so. Single-page apps deliver a much better user experience and provide smooth operations in the app. World giants including Netflix, various Google services (including Gmail and Google Maps), and Facebook are available in this way.
The momentum gained by the gold standard of single page apps results in a high amount of engineering work aiming to deliver the best performance. Initially done mostly on the client-side, single page apps are gradually floating toward server side generated apps, where the user gets prerendered and ready-to-go information as fast as possible.
Content personalization
Netflix and Facebook are also great examples of content personalization – basically, every user has their own feed or a selected proposal. Content personalization takes many forms that can increase convenience and boost user loyalty.
According to McKinsey data, 75% of users tried new shopping behavior during the pandemic, including being in search of new, more interesting experiences. Best ones come from personalized offer, as one gets from Netflix or Amazon.
Merging ecosystems
Web apps are oftentimes a part of a larger ecosystem of apps and devices the user has at their disposal. According to IoTforAll, the market for the Internet of Things is expected to grow by 18% to 14.4 billion active connections. All these devices require controlling panels and dashboards that are usually delivered as a single-page application to hold all the data and information flow under one umbrella.
Web development consulting and prototyping
With the less certain times approaching and the overall decline in investor’s willingness to put money in less promising endeavors, we see an increasing need to deliver MVPs, reach for idea validation, and seek consultation at an early stage.
This creates a new, more agile, and more resilient way to approach startup building, demanding different sets of skills from both founders and supporting companies like Tooploox.
Granular.ai (read the case study) is a great example of this approach, where idea evaluation at an early stage enabled the company to mitigate risks and avoid sunken costs.
Developer perspective
Business trends regarding web app development are only one side of the coin. The need to deliver personalized content or to interconnect various devices and environments has to be reflected by the tech side of the equation as well.
AI in runtime webe
Content personalization and making user experience more tailored to the user’s needs can be delivered by applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to support the experience. Yet these models are resource-hungry, both in terms of data and computing power.
The answer is in running them in the local environment, be that a web browser on a PC or a user’s smartphone.
WebAssembly
WebAssembly is another way to provide the necessary computing resources to the application – it basically provides the developers with a standardized virtual machine within every browser to run some features of the application (or even full apps).
The additional computing resources can be used to deliver more powerful apps or to smoothen operations, depending on needs. Currently the most popular language to write WASM code is Rust due to its support and robust and reliable memory management solutions. It provides tools like yew or leptos which are similar to both React.js and Solid.js.
In fact, Rust appears to be an emerging tool that will enable us to build the next generation of web development tools.
New interesting libraries
Programming is also about new technologies to follow that may emerge and make the programmer’s jobs easier. According to the State of JavaScript 2022 report, React keeps the dominant position among the most popular frameworks, with 81% of JavaScript professionals using it. Angular is the second most popular tool, used by 48.8% of specialists and Vue.js comes in third.
The Tooploox web development team has named the following frameworks to use in 2023:
- Vanilla-extract – this is an increasingly popular CSS-in-JS solution, where CSS classes are created from styles during the app build, not in the runtime environment. This gives the developer the freedom to dynamically calculate colors and gradients without the risk of flooding the user device with excess code and making the app sluggish.
- Solid.js – a next generation framework that aims to soothe the pains known from React and Knockout while keeping their reliability and familiarity
- Qwik – Qwik’s main goal is to optimize the performance of the edge. The framework can be used to deliver outstanding performance even on older mobile devices
- Astro – Astro is a tool that focuses on building pages using smaller, isolated components that are initially served as HTML code, reducing the loading time and time-to-interactive
- Next.js 13 – this year will also see the wide usage of the fresh and hot 13th version of Next.js that was launched in November 2022.
Development experience (DX)
Apart from user experience, the developer experience is also a trend that matters and will make a difference in the near future. There are new tools that make the coding and app-building process much easier and smoother. These include:
- Vite – a tool that deals with the prolonged response times between the developer and the developer servers, which can take up to minutes. With this tool in place, the response times are reduced to a minimum.
- esbuild – another tool focused on speed and reducing the response times between the developer and the development server.
- SWC – another development tool, written in Rust, that can be used for compilation and bundling alike.
- tRPC – this tool was designed to support full stack typescript programming, delivered as a framework agnostic and light development environment.
Server components in ReactJS
Last but not least – an experimental demo of server components was launched in December 2020, with the aim to be fully polished before the release of React 18. The key was in the experimental feedback delivered by developers. By now, this feature was not released in the stable version.
The year 2023 will probably see the further development of this component type and hopefully see it reach a stable release.
Summary
In this 5+5 trends edition, the key was in showing the overlapping business needs and the solutions provided by the tech industry. Where business departments ask for more AI and power, technologies respond in building new tools and frameworks to deliver better responses.
If you wish to get more information on the ways to connect your business needs with possible tech solutions, don’t hesitate to contact us now!