Developments in Development
Web development has come a long way over the past couple of decades. I can remember designing in Microsoft Publisher (yeah that’s right, Publisher!) and then taking its output files to an FTP program to be uploaded to Tripod, back when member sites were preceded with a tilde (~). I remember thinking I was hardcore writing my markup in Notepad, <UPPERCASE> tags and all. Better yet, I remember using HTML as a means to trick the browser into displaying my content as I wanted.
Fast-forward to 2014 and you’ll find developers using a slew of technologies including HTML5, SCSS, PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and jQuery, frameworks such as AngularJS, and even entirely new languages e.g., Dart. The development ecosystem is very healthy.
Here is where things really begin to get interesting. As the Web continues to grow as a medium through which untold numbers of people share information and connect to worlds outside their own, more platforms will continue to move to the Web. Mobile devices and much more capable browsers are enabling great advances in the way we share data. These other platforms have brought ideas of modularity and reusability to a once very static world. And now, with frameworks such as AngularJS, we are being acquainted with Model View Controller (MVC), which compartmentalizes one’s data model, view template, and controllers into separate files for testing and code reusability.
With ES6 on its way and the idea of web components beginning to be more mainstream, I see the realization—at least to a small degree—of Tim Berners-Lee’s idea of a semantic Web. And although ES6 isn’t fully standardized yet, we can use awesome tools such as Angular directives. Directives are custom HTML elements that can add meaning to a document, and since a developer has gone to the trouble of abstracting this data out into modules or components, such useful semantic meaning can be reused throughout an application.
I’m more than excited to be developing in this modern ecosystem and feel the Web is where everything is moving towards, and for good reason!