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The 8 Biggest Web Development Trends at the Moment
Being a developer isn’t just about knowing how to write code. If only it was!!
A huge part of it is keeping up with web development trends in your area to stay at the cutting edge. This is our run-down of some to look out for in 2024.
With each passing year, the web has been getting more and more ingrained in our daily lives. We use it for everything, from banking to reading the news to inexplicably getting groceries delivered to our doors in minutes. With the pandemic forcing even more of our lives online, the demand for web development talent is as high as ever, and the scope of what programmers can do is huge.
If you’re only learning about this world and you’ve learned what a web developer actually does as part of their day-to-day job, this could be a good way of getting clued in about what’s hot right now.
As the year draws to an end, I can’t help but wonder what next year will have in store for us. Will the web weave its way into even more areas of our life, filling it with even more confusing buzzwords?
Here’s my list of the top web development trends that I think will reshape the tech landscape in the next while:
- Artificial intelligence
- Low-code and no-code tools
- Internet of Things
- AI chatbots
- Angular 17 and beyond
- Yarn package manager
- Static website generators
- VUI and voice search
- Final thoughts
1. Artificial intelligence
In the past, whenever people talked about the future of technology, artificial intelligence (AI) was always high on the agenda. But finally I think it’s actually justified. Unless you’ve had your head in the ground, a lot of advances have been made in the field of AI and web development in the last year.
2023 was the year that belonged to ChatGPT. There’s a reason why Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year was “hallucinate,” and it had nothing to do with psychedelics.
Finally, many of the biggest tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta (formerly Facebook), have been releasing their generative AI technology to be used by the public.
With easier access to the necessary tools for AI development, we can expect developers to start using AI in new and different ways in the new year. What’s more AI already features heavily in data analytics, so expect the rest to follow suit. For example, GitHub’s Copilot is just one of a multitude of AI programming tools which are becoming a casual part of developer’s workflows.
In fact, another sign of AI as a trend is the success of The Grid itself—it’s currently sunsetting V2 and preparing to launch a new one sometime in 2023.
Further viewing: Video: 5 Must-Read Articles on AI (2024)
2. Low-code and no-code tools
To be honest, I initially had a dilemma about whether to include this as one of the trends. Surely the success of low-code and no-code tools will be encouraging fewer people to learn to code, right?
Not exactly.
While the continued rise of these tools is in part an answer to the same coding skills gap that made web development a lucrative career salary-wise, the computers are not coming to take your jobs. In fact, we would actually still need to train the developers to operate the LC:NC tools anyway.
These tools will help smaller companies get development (and no-code design work) work done faster, definitely in tandem with generative AI tools. The low-code market is projected to hit 148.5 billion dollars by 2030, so watch this space.
3. Internet of Things (IoT)
Long heralded as the future, in the past while some might have felt that the internet of things is already finished. However, this movement where typically non-internet-connected objects are given network connectivity in order to send and receive data is only getting started.
Web developers may not have been directly involved in the creation of such devices (that’s for product designers), with UI designers working more heavily through voice user interfaces. Coders are involved in the development of applications that use, analyse and display the devices’ data. Companies such as Xively and BugLabs have already started working on APIs that can be used by developers to communicate with IoT devices.
Moving into 2024, developers are exploring ways to integrate IoT data into web platforms, enabling real-time data visualizations, predictive analytics, and personalized experiences.
4. AI chatbots
While again, these may have been around in one guise or another in recent years, expect this area of work to become a huge growth area in 2024, after the success of generative AI and LLMs last year.
Essentially, the reason for this is that the accuracy and usability of these chatbots has seriously increased and become more sophisticated, giving companies far more opportunities to employ them.
In terms of the technology behind them, opportunities for backend developers are plenty, as they require complex information retrieval, language processing, and machine learning systems to flourish. Machine learning and AI engineers are also popular AI jobs to explore for this. Web developers fluent in machine learning languages such as Java, R, and Python will find themselves with a whole host of opportunities and interesting projects to get to grips with.
In terms of whether this trend will be a longer-lasting one, it’s easy to see that this is one of them. Not only do companies save money on employing customer support staff, they also mean they can reach even more of their customers than before, with companies employing chatbots on their social media platforms as well.
5. Angular 17 and beyond
Way back in 2016 a different version of Angular came out, and with it came a lot of changes —Google’s frontend JavaScript framework was been completely redesigned.
It now takes advantage of JavaScript ES6’s features, applications are written in TypeScript, and they now moved towards a more component-driven architecture.
Along with backwards compatibility, Angular now has a more defined and regular release schedule. It’s planned that Angular 18.0 will be released in May 2024.
Learn more about how to choose when to deploy Angular vs React for your projects.
Career change: How I became a web developer
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6. Yarn package manager
Package managers are incredibly popular tools, especially in the frontend JavaScript communities.
They make it easier for developers to install, update, configure and uninstall code modules within their applications. They do so by communicating with a registry of code modules and manage the various dependencies code modules usually have.
The most popular JavaScript package managers are NPM and Bower. However, a new package manager has been developed by Meta, in collaboration with Exponent, Google and Tilde. We expect its popularity to grow.
Yarn aims to address issues Meta had experienced with NPM, particularly in areas such as performance, security, and consistency. This new package manager still has access to the NPM and Bower registries.
For example, when using NPM, depending on the order in which modules are installed, developers might end up with two different versions of a particular module in their local development environment. This can cause issues where everything works fine on one developer’s machine but not on another’s. To address this issue, Yarn uses lockfiles to tie modules to a specific version within a project, thus assuring that the same version is installed on all developers machines.
Coming in fifth place in the Most Used section of the 2023 StackOverflow Developer Survey, expect Yarn’s trajectory to go up and up.
7. Static website generators
Static website generators create websites from plain text, usually stored in files and not in databases. In certain situations, static websites built by generators such as Jekyll allow for some advantages.
These include such as increased speed, security, ease of deployment and their handling of traffic surges.
However, they have no real time content or user content (such as comments), which have become a “must” on the web today. As Content Delivery Networks and APIs become more and more the way of life of the web and make it easier for content and templates to be deployed, many devs think static site generators might be an interesting area to watch in the coming year.
Separating the templates and markup from the “full-stack” way of thinking might just make static site generators the “it” thing again.
8. VUI and voice search
“But voice recognition tech has been around for over decade!” we hear you protest. It seems that in 2024, however, things are truly picking up speed.
We’re not just talking about Amazon Alexa and other smart speakers anymore.
Statista predicts that the voice recognition market will explode from $10 billion in 2021 to $50 billion in 2029, a CAGR growth of 23.7%. The folding of generative AI into voice search is not just a possibility: Google have already rolled it into Assistant.
We’ve already covered how you can become a voice user interface designer, but aspiring web developers should be looking how to optimize every application they work on for voice search and navigation, particularly mobile apps. We’re far past the stage of this being a “nice-to-have” anymore—it’s a must.
9. Final thoughts
If nothing stands still for too long on the web as a rule, the world of web development even more so. Information is always changing and the methods we use to deal with that information will always evolve along with it.
Remember that web development trends may come and go, but having a firm understanding of the fundamentals will stand to you permanently. Make sure that you have all of your bases covered before following a trend or carving out a niche for yourself.
So, if you’re interested in getting involved, what are you waiting for? Try CareerFoundry’s free 5-day coding course to see if starting a career in web development in 2024 is for you.
If you’re interested in reading more, then check out these articles:
- What are the best free coding bootcamps out there?
- The differences between a mobile app and a web app
- How much will I earn as a full-stack developer?
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Source: https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/web-development/8-biggest-trends-in-web-development-trends/
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