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Technology continuously develops as humans find ways to innovate, doing everything faster with more elegance than before. Over the decades, website development has incredibly changed. In 1983, the Internet was invented, and now there are over 1.86 billion websites as of June 2021. And as a website owner, you need to be aware of the changing trends in web application development. While failing to be in trend can create critical consequences for website performance. In this article, we will learn about the top 10 trends in the web application development industry.
Web Application Development Trends For 2022
So what are the trends that, as a website owner, you should follow? Let’s get into it!
Blockchain Technology
Blockchain comes with peer-to-peer architecture that offers a transparent, distributed, and decentralized ledger. Contracts that run on the blockchain networks cannot be modified, making this technology secure. Data in a blockchain is stored on either a public or private network, making it accessible to the users. Also, data across networks can be transferred without any intermediaries.
Blockchain has the potential to transform different business sectors by minimizing cybersecurity risks. Hence, with blockchain, web developers can use open-source systems for projects making the development process easier.
As blockchain is a versatile and sought-after technology, some of the largest firms like IBM Blockchain Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure Blockchain Service have adopted it and begun to provide blockchain-as-a-service facilities.
Single-Page Application (SPA)
Single-page applications are considered one of the recent trends in the web development industry. SPAs are JavaScript-based applications that load an HTML page in a user’s browser and dynamically update content as required without the need to refresh the page. As SPAs are leveraged by Twitter, Facebook, and Google, they have been widely embraced by the web developers community. SPAs are cost-effective and consume less space on servers while providing information on a single page to users.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
PWAs are not new in web application development, but they are still among the top trends. A PWA is an application working as a website that offers a complete native mobile app experience to the users. It runs on the browser independently, and users can interact with them as a native application. PWA reduces development and support costs, saves device storage and power, has seamless updating and maintenance, and launches quickly. Progressive web apps are used by brands like Pinterest, Uber, Twitter, and Starbucks.
API-first Development
The API-first development is as precise as it sounds. API-first is a web application development approach that focuses on application programming interfaces before anything. It ensures that your web app API is consistent, reusable, and of high quality to ensure compatibility, developer-friendliness, and broad adoption of API. As APIs are an essential part of microservices-based architecture, it becomes important for the web developers to consider how the APIs of the application are going to behave and can it be easily integrated into the web application. API-first approach has several advantages, like, flexibility, scalability, fault-tolerance, high availability, and lower development costs.
Motion UI
Nowadays, consumers are not only expecting a mobile-friendly or faster web application, but they also expect more interactive experiences. That’s where Motion UI comes into view. Motion UI is a front-end framework using which developers can easily build completely responsive and can also use predefined motions with the native app. Moreover, Motion UI can make an element spin, slide, bounce, and more. Although it has already been accepted worldwide since 2018, SASS libraries have made Motion UI more accessible than it ever was.
Voice Search
Ever since the world wide web consortium has introduced accessibility guidelines and standards, web developers have remained keen to develop a web app that anyone, including hearing or sight-impaired audiences, can access. And over the past few years, we have seen a sudden growth in voice recognition technology and smart speakers by major companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple. So it becomes important for the website owners to add voice search features to their sites for enhanced user experience.
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality or VR has gained popularity among users. It is a simulated 3-dimensional environment experience created by devices. The adoption of virtual reality in 2022 will be higher than in 2021. Moreover, virtual reality can also help enhance the remote working experience. VR can be used in a website to visualize a product the user is about to buy or develop devices that are VR-enabled and can revolutionize the tourism, retail, and architecture industries.
Testing Automation
Automation in testing refers to testing the application with minimum human intervention to gain more efficiency. Needless to say, testing is a vital part of web application development to determine the quality of a project before delivery. With testing automation, developers will be able to complete complex projects even with small teams, as automation testing offers transparency, test coverage, and the ability to determine if the project is ready for delivery or not.
Serverless Architecture
Serverless architecture has gained popularity among developers as it replaces regular servers with cloud to minimize physical machine resource consumption. Serverless technology helps developers to remove system overloading, reduce development costs and reduce data loss. Some of the serverless architecture service providers are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Artificial Intelligence Powered Chatbots
Another crucial technology trend for web applications is AI-powered chatbots. The chatbot here uses natural language processing and machine learning to swiftly understand the intent of the user and provide a human-like experience. AI-based chatbots not only offer 24×7 behaviour analysis or problem-solving but can also be integrated into websites easily.
Conclusion
The modern trends in web development are about to change the way businesses interact with their online customers. Almost all the trends that we are about to observe in 2022 are focused on optimizing the user experience for different devices. To keep up with the web app development trends, you can even hire developers with years of expertise. Staying relevant to the web development trends can help ensure your web application is regularly attracting and delighting your audience.
