ProgrammingJavascriptCareerProductivityGadgetsASP.NETWeb Design

4 Web Technologies To Learn This Year

Written by
Published on
Modified on
Filed under
4 Web Technologies To Learn This Year

Because one is never truly done learning. Here is a list of some important technologies that web developers should pick up this year. Some of these aren't new, but they are becoming more important as time goes on. Also, notice how none of these are JavaScript UI frameworks, and that is because most of those frameworks essentially do the same thing. They bind data to DOM elements, just in their own different ways. So if you learn one, then you're not too far off form learning the others. The following list of technologies, however, are completely different, and they have nothing to do with data binding. They're a bit more complex and their functionality is, essentially, non website specific.

ECMAScript

Anyone who thinks they've mastered JavaScript, doesn't realize that the ECMAScript standard changes every year, and adds new functionality and deprecates the unused bits. So no, you can't really master JavaScript. Currently we're on ECMAScript 7, or ECMAScript 2016, however you choose to call it, and it's definitely more complex than document.getElementById.

The reason it's important is because the standard has alot to offer, and many developers end up reinventing the wheel many times to accomplish something that JavaScript can already do by default. Also, nowadays, performance on websites is definitely an issue so knowing the appropriate classes to use for JavaScript-based animations becomes highly important in order to give users a faster and cleaner UI experience. The ECMAScript standard, however, is massive. There are hundreds of pages of classes and functions to go through here.

You can view the full 2016 standard right here in PDF format, and it's definitely an interesting read. Implementing just one more function a week will give you an advantage over anyone who goes to jQuery for almost everything.


WebRTC

WebRTC is a relatively new standard and set of JavaScript based API's that deal with Real Time Communication. And the most amazing part is that it all takes place right on your browser without any plugins. Which means it can work on your mobile browser too, as long as the browser has WebRTC support. It's what WhatsApp uses for their communication platform, and many other sites as well. You can send audio, video, and more importantly, data. Whereas before in order to accomplish this you would require Flash installed, or custom plugins that the developers would need to ensure worked on a variety of platforms, which the user would then need to grant access to their computers in order to work. Needless to say, it was a fair amount of work to say 'Hello' to someone. Now you can make it happen with basic JavaScript code and a few carefully crafted functions.

For a quick overview of the basic WebRTC functionality, you can read my blog post right here. It goes over the audio/video transfer capabilities of WebRTC. And it's actually very cool to see two browsers transmitting via JavaScript full video and audio in real time.


Xamarin

Microsoft has finally made the leap into the mobile market. They recently purchased Xamarin in a move that worried some developers. But those worries were for naught and now Xamarin is freely available to all developers to tinker with. Xamarin is a mobile app development software that can take your .NET code and deliver native iOS, Android, and Windows apps, using that very same code throughout.

Many app developers right now do not use unified code for their applications, which is why you'll see app updates appear on iOS first or on Android an then on their counterparts months later. It's because they have to take those same updates and replicate them in a different environment and a different language. This becomes expensive for any developer, in both time and money. Xamarin eliminates that entirely with a single code-base and an excellent translation into the native language you're targeting.

WebGL

WebGL, I feel, is the future of web development. It bridges a gap that many people thought unbridgeable. With WebGL we finally have hardware accelerated graphics right on our browsers, which opens up websites to much more than just the traditional header, menu, content, ad format. Now we can have essentially anything that a designer or developer can think of. And again, to get a quick overview of what WebGL has to offer, feel free to check out my blog post right here.

And its importance lies in it's complexity. Graphics are never easy. Just ask any game developer. And it's no different in a JavaScript based environment. So the faster you start to learn WebGL, the faster you'll learn the intricacies and the limitations. I'll say this, I've attempted to learn WebGL on numerous occasions, and normally I get to the part where I have a block that moves around the screen using my keyboard before I give up. It's definitely not an easy ride, but to those that manage to get a good hang of it, kudos to you. To see some examples of WebGL in action, head on over to ChromeExperiments.

The truth is that these are dull sounding and boring concepts to learn, and most people won't bother. They'll go instead for the colorful sounding JavaScript engine that's hitting the scene currently. That will, more than likely, just bind a variable to a div. But man will it take you on a wild ride doing so. But this list is where the real work is being done. It's where you can sit down for an hour, and think about what is actually possible with peer to peer data transfer just a few lines of code away. It's where that next big game is hiding its head, where users will simply visit the webpage, and start right where they left off seamlessly. So pick one, or two, and start coding up the future.

Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.

Comments

I
Immense Media Group
7/8/2016 6:08:42 AM
Thanks for dropping informative post. This 4 Technologies is really beneficial in feature. Our web development toronto team will start R&D on this technologies.
Walt
2/17/2017 12:02:47 PM
You are very much welcome!

Developer Poll

Q:

Stay up to date

Sign up for my FREE newsletter. Get informed of the latest happenings in the programming world.

Add a comment

Keep me up to date on the latest programming news
Add Comment

Stay up to date

Get informed of the latest happenings in the programming world.

No thanks