Latest Technologies in Software development

Web development

Web development comes with a huge set of rules and techniques every website developer should
know about. If you want a website to look and function as you wish them to, you need to get
familiar with web technologies that will help you achieve your goal.

Developing an app or a website typically comes down to knowing 3 main

languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And while it sounds quite complicated, once you know
what you are doing, understanding web technology and the way it works becomes significantly
easier.

Fret not if it is not coming easily to you immediately. You may need more time, training, and
patience to dive deeper into the subject, but you’ll end up with a good understanding eventually.

We present you with an introduction to web technologies and the latest web technologies list
hoping it will make things at least a bit easier for you. Now, let’s take a look.

What is Web Technology?

You have probably heard the term “web development technologies” before, but did you ever
think about what it actually means?

Since computers can’t communicate with each other the way people do, they require codes
instead. Web technologies are the markup languages and multimedia packages computers use to
communicate.

1. Browsers
Browsers request information and then they show us in the way we can understand. Think of
them as the interpreters of the web. Here are the most popular ones:

 
Google Chrome – Currently, the most popular browser brought to you by Google

Safari – Apple’s web browser

Firefox – Open-source browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation

Internet Explorer – Microsoft’s browser

2. HTML & CSS

HTML is one of the first you should learn. Thanks to HTML, the web browsers know what to
show once they receive the request. If you want to better understand how HTML works, you also
need to know what CSS is.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it describes how HTML elements are to be displayed
on the screen. If you browse enough tutorials, you’ll soon create CSS text effects, page
transitions, image hover effects, and more. 

If you’re a complete beginner, this Essential HTML & CSS training by James Williamson will
help you to quickly get started with these technologies.

3. Web Development Frameworks

Web development frameworks are a starting point of items that a developer can use to avoid
doing the simple or mundane tasks, and instead get right to work.

Angular

Angular is one of the latest web technologies designed specifically for developing dynamic web
applications. With this framework, you can easily create front-end based applications without
needing to use other frameworks or plugins.

 
The features include well-made templates, MVC architecture, code generation, code splitting etc.
All the expressions are like code snippets that enclosed within curly braces and do not use any
loops or conditional statements.

If you would like to start using Angular or to just quickly evaluate if this framework would be
the right solution for your projects, you can check out this 3-hour training, published in June
2019 by Justin Schwartzenberger, a Google Developer Expert. This course covers everything
that’s necessary to start using Angular, from basic architecture, work with DOM, data binding,
routing, and components, to more advanced topics such as directives and pipes.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a server-side website technology that makes app development much easier and
faster. The thing that really sets this framework apart is the reusability of the code as well as
some other cool features that will help you get the job done in no time.

Popular websites written with Ruby include Basecamp, Ask.fm, GitHub, 500px, and many

others.

Here is everything you need to know about Ruby on Rails.

If you would are interested in a more in-depth training on Ruby on Rails framework, this 10-hour
course by Kevin Skoglund, a senior Ruby developer, might be just the right resource to get
started. It covers the complete learning cycle from the very fundamentals to more advanced
topics such as Layouts, Partials, and View Helpers, giving quite a few practical tasks in parallel.

YII

Yii is an open-source web application development framework built in PHP5. It is performance-

optimized and comes with a number of great tools for debugging and app testing. Another plus is
that it is pretty simple and easy to use.

Meteor JS
Meteor JavaScript is written in Node.js and it makes it possible for you to create real-time web
applications for different platforms. The framework for creating simple websites for personal use
really stands out with Meteor JS.

This is an open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework which also means that the
webpage loading time is significantly shorter. JavaScript stack also makes it possible to get the
same results with fewer lines of code than usual.

This online video course gives an interesting practical example of combining MeteorJS and
React to build a web app.

Express.js

Developed in Node.js, Express.js is a web app development network that is great for those who
need to develop apps and APIs as fast as possible. A lot of great features are provided with the
help of plugins.

This course provides a good insight into the advanced usage of Express.js in combination with
MongoDB and Mongoose and shows different ways of deploying an Express app and running it
in production.

Zend

Zend is an open-source framework based on PHP, focused on building more secure and reliable
web apps and services. It is one of the first enterprise-level MVC frameworks, which came
before the current superhits such as Laravel or Symfony, and many popular PHP engines such as
Magento were built in Zend.

Today Zend is still under active development, and even though it may be less popular than its
opensource siblings, it is a great solution for a large-scale PHP app.

 
Watch this short video course where different PHP MVC frameworks are compared so that you
could make a choice on your own.

Django

Django is one of the most popular frameworks written in Python and follows MVC architecture.
It makes the app development process much easier thanks to its simplicity.

Django simplifies using Python a lot and provides multiple tools that make a web app
developer’s life easier – e.g. an ORM, Models, Django admin, templates, etc. This 1.5-hour
video course can help any developer, even a beginner, to start developing Python/Django apps in
a couple of days.

Check out more popular Python frameworks.

Laravel

Laravel is a PHP development framework ideal for small websites. It comes with a number of
useful features including the MVC support, object-oriented libraries, Artisan, authorization
technique, database migration, etc. Currently, it is one of the most community-supported and
community-developed frameworks, and given that PHP has one of the largest communities out
there, Laravel is a great tool powering both small websites and large-scale B2B web apps
managing millions of transactions daily.

To get started with Laravel in less than 3 hours, watch this video course by Bernando Pineda, a
senior DevOps, and Engineer with 15+ years of software development experience.

It is one of our favorite PHP frameworks.

4. Programming Languages
As we explained before, since computers don’t use languages that are anything like human
languages, they need a different way to communicate. Here are some of the most popular
programming languages:

Javascript – used by all web browsers, Meteor, and lots of other frameworks

CoffeeScript – a “dialect” of JavaScript. It is viewed as simpler but it converts back into

JavaScript

Python – used by the Django framework as well as in the majority of mathematical calculations

Ruby – used by the Ruby on Rails framework

PHP – used by WordPress to create those WYSIWYG editors that everyone is using now. It’s
also used by Facebook, Wikipedia, and other major sites

 
 

Go – newer language, built for speed

Swift – Apple’s newest programming language

Java – used by Android and a lot of desktop applications.

So let’s talk about the most popular ones in a bit more detail.

JavaScript
According to StackOverflow’s annual survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming
language with 62.5% of respondents claiming to use it.

It is one of the core web technologies and if you want to learn more about it, you can start
with this essential training that covers all the basics, working with functions and objects,
interacting with DOM, etc. This course is recent – from April 2019 – Javascript evolves quickly,
so it makes sure you leverage the newest language “perks” as you learn.

Ruby

The developers love Ruby – and for all the right reasons. Designed to be user-friendly and really
easy to use, it’s no wonder that this programming language is often called “a programmer’s best
friend.”

What you can expect from Ruby is a shorter, readable code. Unfortunately, that sometimes
means lower efficiency compared to other programming languages – but it also means higher
productivity.

If you are a beginner in the web development world, Ruby would be a great choice for the first
programming language to learn. A well-written Ruby code can be almost as readable as the
sentence in plain English language.

But the real reason most people use Ruby is its popular framework — Ruby on Rails which we
mentioned earlier in the text. The great productivity achieved with Rails makes it a common
choice for startups who aim for a running start.

Elixir
Elixir appeared back in 2011 and gained popularity almost immediately. It was inspired
by Erlang, a language developed back in the ‘80s by Ericsson. Elixir’s author José Valim
himself said that he loved Erlang, but also noticed some things that could use a bit of
improvement.

Scala

Scala stands for Scalable Language, and is one of the many attempts to “rewrite Java” and it is
compiled to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It is safe to say this programming language
turned out to be quite a success taking into consideration that companies like LinkedIn, Twitter,
and The Guardian use it in their codebases. Scala is known to be a complex language but also a
language worth learning.

This essential 3-hour training may be a good way to start your journey with Scala.

5. Protocols
 
The instructions for how to pass information back and forth between computers and devices are
commonly known as protocols.

HTTP

Thanks to this protocol, each website can get to the browser. The protocol requests the website
from Google’s server and then receives a response with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the
website.

DDP

Uses WebSockets to create a consistent connection between the client and the server. As a result
of that, you get website updates in real-time without having to refresh the browser.

REST

Used mostly for API’s, this protocol has standard methods like GET, POST, and PUT that let
information be exchanged between applications.

6. API
 

An API (application programming interface) allows other developers to use some of the app’s
functionality without sharing the code.

 
 
The endpoints are exposed by the developers while the API can control access with an API key.
Examples of well-made APIs are those created by Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their web
services.

7. Data formats
 

Data is stored in a structure called a data format.

 
 

JSON – JavaScript Object Notation is a syntax for storing and exchanging data (just like XML).
It is currently becoming the most popular data format out there.

 
 

XML – Predominantly used by Microsoft systems, it used to be the most popular data format

 
 

CSV – is data formatted by commas; for example Excel data