Web Dev: 2017 highlights and 2018 predictions

What exciting events in 2017 have the industry leaders focused on? What are their predictions for 2018?

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Rick Manelius, Chief Product Officer, DRUD Tech

2017: Facebook changed the license of React.js, which was the beginning of the chaos, and eventually led to WordPress threatening to remove it from the code base. Given Facebook's size and the fact that it would not benefit financially from adopting this framework, many people (including myself) thought the response should be "take it or leave it". However, to the surprise of the open source community, several Facebook projects were moved to MIT.

2018: I believe many communities will continue to work through crisis identities as codebases, communities, and customers change. Drupal's "ambition" may push smaller projects toward WordPress, and WordPress' Automattic may absorb the low-end to mid-end of the hosting market and undercut others in the ecosystem who have built business models in these sectors. Additionally, we may see certain issues pop up and spawn additional forks, such as what happened in the Node.js community.

Justin Rodenbostel, Executive Director, SPR Consulting

2017: One of the biggest surprises in web development is the abandonment of a large number of old SPA frameworks in favor of React and Angular 2/4. Whether it is a large enterprise or a startup, everyone is interested in creating more attractive user-driven experiences that cannot be achieved with traditional frameworks. The focus on these two frameworks has also led to a broader modernization of front-end developers.

2018: The focus will continue to be on creating experiences, but these experiences will go beyond customized data-driven experiences powered by advanced technologies such as analytics and chatbots. In addition, the Progressive Web Apps model released by Google this year will continue to migrate from native mobile applications to mobile devices, providing a richer and more responsive web experience.

Thierry Schellenbach, Co-founder and CEO, Stream

As the market for developer tools continues to grow, so will the adoption of Function as a Service (FaaS) platforms and APIs. Using FaaS products will become the new normal for developers and product owners to build commonly used features into their applications. Big brands will realize the benefits of building on top of reliable APIs instead of creating specific features from scratch. The biggest benefit is that companies will be able to trade development time for time spent on building basic features, allowing them to focus on the core mission of their product.

Sandeep Adwankar, Senior Product Manager, Sencha

2017: QA and development teams are moving away from monolithic application lifecycle management solutions and toward more flexible, easy-to-install and easy-to-use solutions that integrate with tools in the testing ecosystem.

2018: We will start to see progressive web app (PWA) technologies take over mainstream use in mobile browsers. Web developers will quickly adopt PWA technologies such as service workers, notifications, and background sync, and create modern PWA web apps that are as fast and reliable as native apps.

Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology Officer, SUSE

2018 will be the year when enterprises become more open than ever before. Integrating technologies like analytics and big data with artificial intelligence (AI) requires a truly “open” open source approach, and “open” architectures are better suited to integrating technologies. In a non-open source world, technology integration is like trying to mix one thing with another, which is quite complicated. Most emerging technologies are already open source, such as artificial intelligence or machine learning frameworks, all of which have been open source pioneers. So, when everything is open source, it becomes much easier to combine. To combine different technologies together, you must be open to your competitors and you must also be open to other enterprises. Be truly open source.