Trends in Front-End and Mobile Development for 2018

Brought to you by Alexey Vasiliev, Railsware

Alexey Vasiliev

Web and Mobile Developer (Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, C/C++, Golang, Elixir/Erlang), DevOps
Open-Source libs: PGTune, SQL Joins Visualizer, RWbox, Go-Kinesis, ElixirV8, WebP-ffi, Zopfli-ffi, MongodbLogger, SMTRails, SHTRails, ...
Open-Source books: Cooking Infrastructure by Chef, Setting up and scaling of PostgreSQL (Russian)
Leading RWpod podcast about Ruby and JavaScript

Trends

Pros of React

JSX, Virtual DOM
Testability
Server-Side Rendering(SSR)
One-Way Data Binding

Cons of React

It is a UI library only
You cannot setup a project without npm-ing lots of necessary packages
Too many smaller components leading to over engineering or boilerplate
Poor documentation

Pros of Angular

Two-way data binding
DOM manipulation
Dependency injection, testability
Support for web components

Cons of Angular

Divided community
Updates
Initial load time
Steep learning curve

So what makes Vue.js special?

First, it has a small learning curve, with a component approach similar to React but with a more familiar syntax
The ecosystem is well defined, including a set of de-facto standards: vue-router, vuex
The concept of single-file component that includes template, logic and styles in a single file .vue file is really nice
It's used by one of the most popular PHP frameworks, Laravel, as its default view engine
Maintained by Evan You as an open-source project sponsored through crowd-sourcing

Cons of Vue.js

Small community
Being too flexible can be problematic

Pros of GraphQL

The mental model for integration becomes "what data/operations do I need" (declarative) vs. "how do I get at the data/operations that I need" (imperative)
You can request for the exact data that you need and in one network roundtrip (theoretically)
Strongly typed, enforceable data schemas
A standard way to expose data and operations
Can be added gradually to an existing service layer

Cons of GraphQL

Query In Indefinite Depth
Specific Response Structure
Cache at Network Level
Handling File Upload
Unpredictable Execution
Super Simple APIs

Use Cases

Better execution for languages and toolkits that are currently cross-compiled to the Web
Image / video editing
Games
Peer-to-peer applications
Image recognition
VR and augmented reality
VPN, encryption, etc

Pros of Webpack

Dead asset elimination
Easier code splitting
You control how assets are processed
Stable production deploys
Great speed benefits

Cons of Webpack

Webpack is schizophrenic
The documentation is awful
Configuring Webpack is a minefield for newcomers
Maintained mostly by one person

Pros of Parcel

Small to medium sized projects
Blazing fast bundle times
Zero config code splitting
Bundle all your assets
Automatic transforms

Cons of Parcel

Very young
Small community

Mobile Trends

OEM SDKs

WebViews

Reactive Views

Flutter

The fact that Flutter is the only mobile SDK that provides reactive views without requiring a JavaScript bridge should be enough to make Flutter interesting and worth trying, but there is something far more revolutionary about Flutter, and that is how it implements widgets.