Future Trends in Web Development
Future Trends in Web Development
Abstract. Where is the web of the future heading? Nobody can predict this for
sure, but nevertheless it might be interesting to observe some trends that loom
ahead. This article will give a brief overview of some possible technological
foundations of the future web: ECMAScript Harmony, Web Components and
the Semantic Web.
After that some roles the web of the future might increasingly play are outlined.
We seem to be heading toward a ubiquitous web, becoming the most wide-
spread and available platform for applications and increasingly services, too.
Writing about the future is a risky, since history can prove the predicting person
wrong very easily. Nevertheless the author is convinced that thinking and speculating
about the future is ever more important in a world that is changing so fast. It requires
some open mindedness about the possibilities where we are going. The future may
surprise us in many ways, but some parts of it can and should be anticipated by atten-
tive people.
It is a myth that the future comes from nowhere. It is always rooted in the past and
learning about the history can help predicting the future. Even in a time where a lot of
technology happens for the first time, they usually have dozens of years of research
and development behind. Tablets, for example, date back as far as to the 50s1.
The Web has an interesting relationship to the future. Since its architecture is de-
centralized, no one has direct control were the web is heading. Users and developers
set the course for the future of the web, for better or worse. Trends nobody originally
anticipated, like rich web applications, emerge and scratch hard on the limits on the
currently available technology.
After a new trend has established itself or shown enough promise, the official de-
velopment and standardization process might pick it up, adding better technological
support and making it a native part of the web technology stack. This may seem like a
slow, sometimes rough process but it is truly “bottom up”, fitting the decentralized
nature of the web.
One of the obvious disadvantages of this is process is, that technical advancement
has to wait for developer and user adoption. Since many people use outdated brows-
ers, the current web is a compromise of what is working for the majority of them.
Because of that the current state of the web always lags years behind the new ideas
and standards.
Chapter 2 will introduce some key technologies that are currently in development
and may build the foundation of the future web. Chapter 3 will focus on roles the
future web may increasingly play. Both will not go deep into technical details but
outline the main ideas and the implications those trends might have.
1 Dimond 1957
2 ECMAScript community 2014
ECMAScript 6 is currently in working draft 3 state with a feature freeze already in
place. The official publication date is expected to be June 20154.
Of course even after the official publication it will take months to years for the
browsers to implement ES6 completely and many years until the majority of users
have their browser updated to support those features. Until then developers can start
using parts of ES Harmony through transpilers, like Google Traceur5. They allow for
writing more modern JavaScript and compiling it to ES3 or ES5 for outdated brows-
ers. Some features of ES6 can be retrofitted to older browsers through small JavaS-
cript libraries, called shims6. This process is called feature modernization.
Current State
Web Components are another technology that is currently in standardization pro-
cess. There are a few W3C specs, most of them in working draft state. One part –
templates – is already included in the final, recommended HTML5 Spec16.
Like ES6 the adoption of the feature depends on the browser and user adoption.
Meanwhile there are shims (a script that add support for modern features in older
browsers) which could speed this up significantly.
Web Components have complete support in Google Chrome and partial in Firefox.
However it’s currently not entirely sure if Safari and IE start to implement it too.
Since Web Components is a rather big extension to the current browsers, those shims
are rather heavy and complex in nature – which has significant size and performance
implications17. That makes the future of Web Components somewhat uncertain, which
is a pity since it is one of the most interesting and promising new approaches to web
development in the opinion of the author.
Custom Elements
Creating custom elements20 is the main feature of Web Components. This approach
has some advantages over the current libraries: It not only blends completely into the
way the browser works natively, the API of the new component is simple HTML.
Behavior or appearance can be altered by adjusting the content and attributes of it.
This makes it very easy to use and re-use, since it is basically just an HTML embed
code.
Shadow DOM.
Native Elements hide their implementation and inner working from both users and
developers. This is done through the Shadow DOM 21, which is a separate, inaccessi-
18 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/embedded-content.html#the-picture-element
19 https://github.com/ResponsiveImagesCG/x-picture
20 Dimitri Glazkov 2013
21 Dimitri Glazkov, Hayato Ito 2014
ble DOM tree just for that element. It contains further HTML elements that are ren-
dered and calculated by the browser.
Web Components essentially open up the Shadow DOM for developers, allowing
them to use it for hiding complexity and preventing unwanted manipulation from
outside, which could mess up the logic or style of the element. That way, different
components can’t incidentally interfere with each other.
HTML Imports
Currently libraries require the web-developer to add new script and CSS-link tags
to their HTML, which adds new requests the browser has to handle. After that some
more HTML is usually required to create the frame the library is working in. With the
new HTML Imports feature 22 this can be aggregated into one module import that
consists of HTML with JavaScript and CSS already embedded. This makes including
Web Components even more convenient.
The Web is advancing as the most important and widespread application platform.
There are several operating systems which are built to be web-first, like FirefoxOS30,
ChromeOS31 or WebOS32. Currently they do not have a big market share, but its in-
creasing33.
Even Operating Systems that have their own native platform are making big efforts
to support the web as a secondary platform. iOS and Android are already there, Mi-
crosoft hopped onto this trend with the release of Windows 8 34 and Windows Phone.
This trend does not stop at classical computing devices: Smart TVs, Cars and even
fridges start to support the web platform. It is hard to find systems which don’t. The
web seems to establish itself as the ubiquitous platform, making JavaScript the most
universal, cross-platform language.
29 Lanthaler 2013
30 https://www.mozilla.org/de/firefox/os/
31
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os
32 http://www.openwebosproject.org/
33 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819917
34 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us//library/windows/apps/br211385.aspx
35 David Herman et al. 2014
36 http://asmjs.org/
37 https://www.dartlang.org/
An impressive example of a port of already existing native code is Linux running
in the browser38 or the Unreal Engine 4 ported to HTML539.
This trend is establishing JavaScript the default, cross-platform “virtual machine
byte code”. Ironically JavaScript succeeds, where JAVA once failed.
38 http://bellard.org/jslinux/
39 https://www.unrealengine.com/html5/
40 Google Webmaster Central Blog 2014
41 Spike Brehm 2013
42 http://www.w3.org/standards/webofservices
munication happens to make the web a smarter and more interconnected experience.
The growth of (RESTful) APIs over the last years is tremendous43.
Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things is a topic on its own, so this article will focus on how web-
development might play an important part in the IoT and vice versa.
IoT devices are always connected to the internet, building a bridge between the
physical world and the internet. It is important to disambiguate between the terms
internet and web. The former is the low-level infrastructure and platform the later
runs on. There are a lot of new protocols and standards in development that are geared
rather toward IoT and not Web use.
Many of the here mentioned technologies may play an important part in the IoT.
The Semantic Web already has put a lot of research and development into machine-
to-machine communication which is an essential part of making the IoT happen.
Since the web as a platform has become nearly ubiquitous it could become the (hu-
man-facing) platform of the IoT as well. In order that the IoT can benefit from the
collected information and intelligence that is already existing in the web, a Web of
Services becomes even more important.
Since the IoT and the web share the same platform it might be possible that we see
an even greater fusion of both, IoT influencing the web and vice versa. Maybe people
in the future even won’t make a big distinction here anymore.
4 Outlook
We’re heading toward a ubiquitous web44 that escapes the browser window and en-
ters devices and services of all kind. The technological foundations to make this hap-
pen have already been laid or are in the process of doing so. With the ever increasing
importance of the web, the pace of future development is likely to increase. For sure
it’s an exciting time to be a web-developer these days.
43 http://www.programmableweb.com/news/9000-apis-mobile-gets-serious/2013/04/30
44 Andreas Hotho, Gerd Stumme 2010
Publication bibliography