5 Ways Web Development Industry Changed Since It's Beginnings
Published on 22 September 17
Ganapathi0
Being an entrepreneur is always a cool thing to me, it's rewarding and a great journey. I have been working in the technology landscape for more than a decade now. This course of experience helps me a lot at a personal and professional level. Things change day by day, some are trivial, some has the significant impact, and some are path breakers.
Whenever I had an opportunity to discuss with the students or the young fresh developers or new joiners of the industry, one of the questions asked was:"How the web development industry changed?"
Well, there are many answers to it. In the constantly evolving world, with the power of hardware and computation capabilities, the changes are very rapid now. Innovations and Discoveries happen every other day somewhere in the world. So to answer the question on "How the web development industry changed?" is too broad spectrum to be covered. So when I respond to this question, I restrict myself to the Web Application Development landscape only. Being in the service industry, developing and delivering software products to the global clients following are the flashy list of things that come to my mind when I think about How the web development industry changed.1) JavaScript Paradigm
Still, I remember the days, where developers thinks JavaScript as just a validation mechanism. The discussions were too long on what are the validations could be managed at browser level with JavaScript. There were discussions on how to handle the situation if the user disables the JavaScript in their browsers. There were too many scenarios where the web application crashed because of the misconfiguration or version issues of JavaScript. There were scenarios of improperly executed business logic and validations.
Now there are many Javascript platforms which are driving the web development world. MEAN stack , Node, React, Angular are very few which attracts the product owners, developers and web development companies. The concept of single page application is very well within reach only because of the Javascript frameworks. There is a complete change in the way of the design thinking process of User Interface of web applications. The rich user experience at the browser level has a commendable improvement for last 1-2 years.
2) The "Cloud" Way
Earlier Hardware is always a critical thing to think about in the web development industry. Even though the product idea is great, solves the significant customer problem and a disruptive innovation; the hardware cost plays a major role on the product roll out. Especially the hardware scalability is a perennial challenge. The software design has to consider the hardware limitation completely even before the production roll out. Auto scaling options are very less, and the product developers always end up with production support difficulties.
Cloud platforms revolutionize the web development landscape now. Hardware cost is inexpensive or almost take up a thin budget in the software product development budget. Auto scaling options are very much user-friendly. Pay and use mode of pricing plans are available with all the service providers.
Cloud services make the life of software product developers very easy. Amazon pioneered the cloud era with its AWS platform followed by many other companies including Google & Microsoft. Platforms such as Heroku and Linode even removes the technical bottleneck for the founder's team. The abstraction of the Infrastructure skills with the simple web user interface of these platforms makes the deployment, product environment maintenance, auto scaling and any tasks related to Infrastructure as a child's play. These developments fuel the way the software products are developed and deployed. "The 'Cloud' Way" is one of the best and top most changes in the Web Development Industry.
3) The "Mobile" Expectations
Gadgets changed the way of design thinking a lot. They had touched every Jack & Tom on the streets. The technology enabled the life of many people in a commendable way when the "Mobile" devices come to play. The price reduction in the mobile devices and amazing features it provides to the mobile user makes the web development industry to change the way of the application design. The mobile fluidness (responsive design) is an essential norm for any web or application design now. Google AMP behavior recommendations have a significant impact on all the UI design deliverables.
The Mobile users demand moves as a need for a "mobile application." Planning and Development of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as part of web application development became the critical success factor for business excellence. The APIs helps the mobile developers to create awesome mobile apps which complement the web applications. On the move, the business need for the end users is served by the solution providers.
4) NO SQL Way
In the last 2 years there is a rapid increase in data mining and data capturing. There are many options available for capturing the data The Machine Learning and the Artificial Intelligence futures demands to collect this data.
Advertisement Retargeting, Customer Behaviour Research, Providing Analytics, Market Research, Product Validation are the few areas to be mentioned where the data collection is playing a phenomenal way. But the bottle neck emerges with relational databases which cannot hold so much of data and supports the technical platforms to process the data to find out the "Information." There are situations where the data is not very structured too. The information exchange process between the software systems is also emerging. The Mammoth & Legacy RDBMS systems are not sufficient to run at the same speed of technology platforms.NoSQL platforms emerged and started to play the critical part in the technology architecture. The prominent NoSQL database, MongoDB is getting better day by day. Along with the prominent position MongoDB took in MEAN stack, makes a new way of designing and developing web applications.
5) "Service" Model of applications
"Licence" era is one of the significant bottle necks in information technology enablement for most of the small and medium businesses earlier.
The software cost would be prohibitive, let the software be used for daily operations or providing a dashboard to review every month or sitting idle for a rare use. This "Cost" part plays as a huge entry barrier for many of the small and medium businesses. But one of the notable change in the way application software is delivered to small and medium businesses as "Software as a Service" makes a significant improvement for IT enablement.
Web development process quickly adapts the market expectations on "Service" models. Because of rapid growth in technological innovations every year, Now a days Software Applications are available to end user as SAAS (Software as a Service), Application Platforms are available to end user as PAAS (Platform as a Service), Infrastructure Platforms are available to end user as IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), and much more to go on.
This kind of "Service" model based application demands a new way in design and development of the web applications. User Management, Super Admin, Pricing Modules, Informative Dashboards, multi-tenant concepts are few evolved which caters to the needs of "Service" model based applications.With all these said, more things are happening in the web development industry at every another moment. The application development paradigm is getting better day by day. The predictions based on the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning concepts are very phenomenal.
In this blog, I have limited this discussion only to the Web Application Development landscape and associated technology improvements.
Thanks for reading!!! Please share your experience on this topic or any other questions you may have, in the comments sections. Would love to hear from you.
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