Future of front-end development: All you need to know for 2020

As popularly said, “Developers are builders of tomorrow,” they always need to pace with the ever-changing IT market loaded with emerging technologies, APIs, and libraries.

Since we are witnessing the fast pace of front-end development due to the trending technologies, the definition of full-stack development varies every now and then. Expecting the front-end development to stick around to specific technologies and frameworks will land you up far behind the competition. Businesses are opting for smarter solutions by hiring full-stack developers equipped with the knowledge of both front-end and back-end technologies. With the rise in demand for full-stack developers, defining front-end developers within a small spectrum of technologies wouldn’t be wise enough.

• What the future has for the Front-end developers?
•  What programming languages will shape the future of the front-end in 2020?
• Micro-frontends have an important role to play

Let us walk through the details. 

What the future has for Front-end developers ?

Front-end development is more than developing websites and making them look good. The bigger picture is how the product caters to the requirement of the user. If the product fails to satisfy the needs of the user, the product owner will stop all the investments on it. Therefore, the prime focus should be tailoring the products as per the requirements of the target audience and this requires research from the developer’s side. 

The user-research includes their behavior, goals, motivation, and aim. Thus 2020 requires more attention from the developer’s side to get into a brief user-research and adopt a user-centered approach for the development.

Front-end development is not limited to the actions a user will be taking. The future demands more of consistency, a clear visual hierarchy, and simple navigation.  Therefore, the front-end developers have to focus on increased usability. 

A report by Statista has proved that the number of mobile users is alarmingly increasing and has no look back in the future as well. With the increase in the number of mobile browsing, the websites have a significant decrease in accommodation. The mobile-first is not expected to be a mere desktop version but more about the size that is expected to shrink in the devices. Moreover, the front-end developers should be responsible for providing the users with the comfort of sliding, tapping, and ticking on mobile devices. 

The front-end developers are expected to build the mobile-first approach highly interactive, accessible, and consistent. It is expected that they would keep the user-centric approach in mind and make convenience as a prime focus for the target customers.

The call-to-action buttons have importance only if the mobile users have a seamless browsing experience. The front-end side should be capable enough to handle all the requests concurrently and flawlessly. 

Thus, front-end developers have a huge responsibility in the coming years when it comes to mobile-first approach and usability. 

Therefore, the front-end developers should be capable of developing applications by leveraging the benefits of front-end development like:  

• High-speed development with user-driven results.
• Secured Codebase.
• Highly reliable and robust.
• Real-time and interactive programming interface.
• Highly responsive and reactive features and apps.
• Highly scalable.

What programming languages will shape the future of Front-end in 2020 ?

1. JavaScript : 

If you aim to build a responsive, seamless website or web application with popular web browsers, then JavaScript is all that you need. The significance of JavaScript is noticeable in front-end development. One of the most important tools for building dynamic, clean, highly responsive, and cost-effective websites is JavaScript. It is one of the strongest bases for web development since 2016. 

JavaScript helps the website to be more interactive and engaging. JavaScript is highly supported by modern web browsers without struggling for plugin software. It is the first client-side language and is responsible for most of the user interaction that takes place on the website. 

The popular frameworks in JavaScript for 2020 will be :

Angular.js :

Businesses can highly reap the benefits by using Angular. Some of its benefits are listed below: 

• It has a Model-View-ViewModel architecture. 
• Two-way data binding.
• Declarative user-interface.
• Reduces the overall complexity and increases the productivity of the project by writing less code.
• Single-page apps for sophisticated user-experiences.
• Renowned and permissive proprietary software license (MIT license)
• Inbuilt testing libraries.
• Elegant browser-based applications behave more like native apps.

Vue.js :

With its inception in 2016, Vue.js has gained worldwide popularity due to its multiple features. Leveraging the power of Vue.js, businesses can have the following benefits:

• Vue.js is smaller in size.
• Easy to understand 
• Highly flexible
• Recommended for cross-platform applications.
• Provides detailed documentation.
• The ability for virtual rendering and high performance. 
• Component-based approach.

React.js :

With a dynamic ecosystem, JavaScript triggers new tools and libraries at regular intervals, leaving users with numerous options to choose from. The situation for frameworks isn’t different. 

With its popularity for being the mainstream, React JS has been used by technical giants like Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla Motors, PayPal to name a few among others. With its robust ecosystem, React has got a lot of attention and will continue its winning streak in the coming years as well. The benefits of choosing React are as follows:

• React is easy to learn and use.
• It houses documentation, training resources, and tutorials.
• Reusable components.
• Reduces performance bottle-neck with the Virtual DOM.
• Well-covered in terms of design and debugging tools.
• Prevents injection attacks through JSX within the React ecosystem.

Node.js :

Node.js is an open-source cross-platform JavaScript that contributes to building real-time network applications. Some of the benefits of Node.js is given below:

• Easy scalability
• Easy to learn
• A server-side programming language.
• The benefit of writing both client and server-side applications 
• High performance and highly extensible.
• Large and active community
• Facilitates caching.
• Begin from scratch and develop apps.
• Seamless multiple requests processing concurrently

2. Python :

One of the most user-friendly programming languages is perhaps Python. Due to its English like syntax, it has become popular among beginners. The syntax is clear and intuitive. Python accords the applications with versatility. The open-source Django framework is feature-rich and easy to learn for people interested in Back-end development. 

Python has touched the field of mathematics and scientific computing with packages like NumPy and SciPy. For building programs in data science, machine learning, image processing, and computer vision, Python libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, sci-kit-learn, and OpenCV are used. 

3. PHP :

83% of the websites are powered by PHP, a server-side scripting language. The vital role of PHP in WordPress Content Management makes websites highly accessible. This feature of PHP is leveraged by tech giants like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Yahoo. 

Whether it is an enhancement of HTML webpages or transferring data through querying databases, PHP has played roles for a variety of purposes. PHP is popular among websites as it can be used for cookie creation, collection & verification of form data, and dynamic content and images display. Another feature of PHP is its capacity to embed itself within web template systems. 

The popular frameworks offered by PHP are Laravel and Drupal. They are widely used to build robust, scalable, and secure applications faster. 

Laravel is heading the list of the most popular free, open-source PHP framework globally. Laravel is capable of:

• Providing secure web applications.
• Faster pace.
• Simplifies tasks like routing, caching, authentication, and sessions.
• Top-notch solutions for applications with complex backend requirements.
• Complex apps tailored to the clients’ requirements.
• Seamless data migration.
• MVC architecture Support.
• View template engine.
• Highly expressive.
• Highly recommended for B2B and Enterprise websites.

4. Swift

With the increasing popularity of iOS-based devices, the programming language Swift has been able to gain a broader market share. Right from its appearance in 2014, Swift has caught the eyes of the developers due to its conciseness, quickness, and less prone to errors. Swift has the following advantages:

• Prevention from memory leaks through automatic memory management.
• Scalable enough to add new functionalities to the product.
• New features are added easily.
• Developers are encouraged for writing clean and readable
• Highly readable due to its English-like syntax.
• The server-side swift can be integrated with any technology.
• It is interoperable with Objective-C
• Faster development process
• Better code sharing

5. Micro-frontends have an important role to play :

With the popularity of microservices, numerous organizations are adopting this architectural style to deal with the constraint of large, monolithic backends. Server-side software has been served well for this purpose but the struggle of the monolithic front-end codebases is still on for many companies. 

The factors that refrain you from delivering high-quality experiences are as follows:

• Feature integration into the existing code.
• Can’t fit build tools into the existing build process.
• Difficulty in scaling the development for a single product due to the complexities in the existing monolith. 

We are witnessing numerous patterns emerging to decompose the frontend monoliths into smaller portions that are simple and easy to develop, test, and deploy independently by appearing a single cohesive product to the customers. This as a whole gives birth to the term ‘Micro-frontends.’

Micro-frontends can be defined as-

Splitting the front-end into smaller sets of loosely coupled applications that are independently deployable and combined together as a single user-facing application.

The key benefits to opting for Micro-frontends are as follows:

• The codebases are smaller and more cohesive.
• Easy to maintain the codebases
• Scalable
• Incremental fashion for upgrading, updating, and rewriting the parts of the frontend. 

Slicing the bigger ones into manageable pieces is all about micro-frontends. It is ideal if the technology choice, teams, codebases, and release processes progress independently without excessive coordination. 

Conclusion :

The front-end development scenario is changing day-by-day. Multiple frameworks and libraries are introduced. Businesses are highly trying to pace with the cut-throat competition in the market. Front-end development companies are trying hard to keep themselves updated with the trends of IT and provide top-notch solutions tailored to the business requirements satisfying the design principles. 

In a nutshell, front-end development has a lot of scope in the coming years for satisfying the seamless and smooth user-experience criteria for businesses around the globe. In this mobile-first world, the interface needs to be satisfying all the essentials such as usability and capacity to handle requests, thus affecting the conversion rate of the website.