Web Development Trends for 2006
September 6, 2005
Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at dashes.com (that is to say, me) have assembled a list of up-and-coming trends that you should keep an eye on. Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0.
Some of the overall areas of focus are integration (as always) and front-end technologies that have highly visible impacts on end user experience. People won't pay for a service or rely on it if it doesn't have a robust back-end infrastructure, but they'll be happy to pay for it if the front-end is attractive and at least seems usable.
Here, then, is a random assortment of new web development trends to be ready for in 2006.
- Dampening:
These technologies go by a lot of names, but in general, dampening is the softening of a user interface through gradual transition instead of immediate state changes. The demand for dampening reflects the front-end focus that is being rediscovered in web applications, but it can require server-side changes in order to enable some effects. The best-marketed example of dampening is the yellow fade technique, but overall, user interface elements will be sliding and collapsing instead of simply disappearing.
Key influences on the user experience here are things like the iPod screen backlight fading out instead of merely shutting off, or soft-close doors on newer automobiles.
- E4X:
This little-known ECMA standard is short for "ECMAscript for XML". That mouthful succinctly describes a powerful concept: Smart, sensible handling of XML in Javascript. Right now, the J and the X in Ajax don't play well together, or at least not as well as they should. E4X promises to smooth that combination, at least in more modern/capable user agents. Support is already present, or will soon be, in both the Flash player and Firefox.
What's the quick synopsis? How 'bout building a form dynamically by doing this:
var html = <html/>;
html.head.title = "Hello, World.";
html.body.form.@name = "hello";
html.body.form.@action = "test.php";
html.body.form.@method = "post";
html.body.form.@onclick = "return foo();";
html.body.form.input[0] = "";
html.body.form.input[0].@name = "Submit";
- JSON:
Why will you want to use JSON to send the data your application is managing? Broad language support. It's simple to read and write. It's designed for transporting structs in a manner that your programming language is used to. And despite the comparisons, don't let anyone frame it as an us vs. them thing: It's just a smart way to handle your data, and it works well with XML: you can just transform to/from XML when needed. There's even a JSON-RPC if you're so inclined.
- Good ole' XHTML and CSS:
Call me old-fashioned, but the basics are always in style. Plenty of sites still haven't had the time, resources, or education to move to standards-based design, but even fewer applications have made the move. Just as many corporate sites relaunched with valid markup, many web apps for intranets or public consumption will be restyling themselves with well-matched tags. In a Greasemonkey-enabled web, it's going to be more important than ever to have a reliable structure that you can hang new behaviors on.
- Buffering:
Just like dampening, this is a return of an old favorite desktop application technique, but (re-)inflicted on the web. Users who've just gotten past seeing the "Buffering..." message in RealPlayer or who are tired of watching "Loading..." graphics on the sites that still abuse Flash for skipped intros will be encountering the same "Please Wait" experience again. But this time, it's the advanced behaviors and Javascripts that power their Ajax apps that will have them twiddling their thumbs. Progressive enhancement isn't just about adding behaviors or presentation to only the user agents that support them, it's about offering a useful experience in full-featured browsers even while the oodles of script are still loading.
Let people get to work quicker, even while the whizzy stuff is loading in the background, and you'll never be accused of forgetting that half the people on the web in the United States are still on dial-up.
- The Atom API:
The fuss (and flamewars) were always over the feed format, but the interesting part of Atom has always been the API, or the Atom Publishing Protocol, if you want to be formal. Now that the feed format is an IETF standard, there's a solid enough spec to start planning for how the API will be built on that core. And with over twenty million blogs already supporting pre-release versions of the spec, it's extremely likely that investing in familiarity with the API now will give you a heads-up in 2006. Pretty much everyone will be clamoring for their applications to connect to blogs via Atom as it gets added to the standards-compliance checklist.
- Helping Ruby Grow Up:
Everybody loves Ruby on Rails, except those who think it's overhyped. Regardless of where you stand on the best-since-sliced-bread/kills-puppies-for-breakfast continuum, there's a lot of development and even deployment happening on the Ruby platform. But key parts of the infrastructure are missing. Localization? Internationalization? They're a f18king pain. Scaling up servers to handle really large applications or high-demand situations? Nobody's really done that at a global scale yet. Interop with other languages? Aside from the "it's all just XML!" form of interoperability, there's a lot of unsolved problems here.
While everyone else is just learning the language and oohing and aahing over the elegance of the framework, you can be digging into the hard problems behind the applications and take advantage of a wide-open opportunity.
- Marketing:
Okay, this one's not a technology. But geeks really need to learn how to explain their skills, the benefits of their skills, and the business advantages provided by those benefits. Knowing half a dozen programming languages won't help you if you can't communicate with the people who want to hire you. And your language/platform/development environment of choice won't succeed unless you do a great job of evangelizing it and promoting it to others, including non-technical people.
First, be an expert with a technology. Second, be even better at explaining the value of that technology. If you can do those things, it doesn't matter which of the items you pick off of the list above.
The Bottom Line
If you have a friend who's looking to change jobs, or know a disgruntled person who's been laid off and Lou Dobbs has convinced him to blame Indian engineers for it, send them this list, and check back with them in a few months to see if they've taken the time to learn some new skills. No whining, just go do some reading. Buy some O'Reilly books or Google up some docs online, and then get hacking. By the time you're good enough to start posting your sample applications, employers will be searching for your blog just to find the talent they need.
Got more ideas of what should we should be studying up on? Feel free to comment.
10:55 PM
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19 TrackBacks
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This week: Microsoft's Web 2.0 platform, Rich Clients, Acquisitions, Web 2.0 in The Real World, Techie Post of the week - Web Development Trends for 2006.
Read More[via Anil Dash] Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Dampening ( yellow fade technique) ECMAScript for XML (E4X) JSON: Good ole' XHTML and CSS: Buffering: The... Read More
[via Anil Dash] Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Dampening ( yellow fade technique) ECMAScript for XML (E4X) JSON: Good ole' XHTML and CSS: Buffering: The... Read More
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21 Comments
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- Earlier: Interview with Ray Nagin
- Next: Straw Man
By "dampening," I'm sure you mean "damping." I doubt that misting with water is involved.
Another E4X example that makes it even more appealing:
var name = "helloForm"; var action = "some/page.php"; var input = "yourName"; var form = <html> <head> <title>My Form</title> </head> <body> <form name={name} action={action} method="post"> <input type="text" name={input} /> </form> </body> </html>;I think we are overdue for a fundamental re-imagining of what portals should look like.
The basic portal user interface is windows 1.0 - maybe even Xerox Parc Pre macintosh - tiled windows you can roll up and down, maybe rearrange, but they can never overlap.
This has been driven by the modal nature of web UI's- you need to get everything done on one screen and watch the whole page refresh.
However, with Ajax-style technologies, it becomes easy to imagine the portal as a web desktop, with unlimited windows, small desk accessories, and real live integration. It would be relatively simple to take a JSR168 portlet and make it play in a more free-form environment- and the aggregation power of portals will be significantly enhanced. They will stop being a collection of discrete window panes, and will become a view onto a virtual file system, one that includes the whole internet.
There are tons of proof of concept apps out there that are creeping up on this idea; it's only a matter of time before one of the big portal products picks it up.
Actually, usage supports both "damping" and "dampening" for this scenario, but I'll take the feedback under advisement.
You suggest to read up on O'Reilly books to get a handle on some of these new technologies, but I have recently come to realize just how far I fall short on point 9. Do you have any recommendations on how to improve a geek's marketing skills?
Hey, shouldn't that be "f2king" instead of "f18king"?
Please don't feel obligated to let this appear on your blog. I just thought you might want to edit.
If you check out the new Microsoft owned site www.start.com you will see much of these technologies in action. Stunning given that they've released it so quietly. I haven't seen a lot of fanfair for it, but that could be simply because its Microsoft and people are ashamed to admit that MSFT can do a good job. It works in IE, Firefox and dies terribly in Safari :) It's a start.
Good summary
Hey David:
I strongly suggest Seth Godin's blog - it's really new age marketing. And geeks will love his self-effacing, smart ass style. (His latest book is "All Marketers Are Liars."
Damping (or dampening in your usage), especially the "yellow fade" effect, seems like it's completely gratuitious. I sure hope it doesn't become a trend.
"Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0."
Um, you seem to have missed a really obvious trend: Developers will realize Web 2.0 came and went a while back, and we're on Web 3.5 or something by now.
Actually, with regards to improved marketing, I hope developers will also improve their marketing counter-mojo, and start rejecting content-free terms such as "Web 2.0", and Humpty Dumpty-stlye vocabulary, such as "AJAX."
I had never heard of E4X before reading this post, but it looks like an extremely useful technology. It should certainly make serving my xhtml as text/xml or application/xml+xhtml much easier.
Great roundup of new (and old) technologies, Anil. This is an excellent list of pointers for what's hot now and most certainly in the near future.
This is like 2 years old trend, at least when developing with MM Flash(and I mean programming, not just useless intros!!!), the deal is that you need a good Flash developers to take control over all the data handling and transition between aplication states, and as direct result the server side becomes easier to develop.
And works ok multiplatfom, unlike javascript.
Been there at least 3 times, with great success.
Another trend I've been predicting since spring is Blank White Servers. There are now two of these: Ning (nee 24 Hour Laundry) and Bunchball (a Flash-based BWS). I'm sure more are to come, additionally you'll see existing sites trying to capture some of the action by extending the power of their users to customize their experience.
E4X certainly looks promising. As someone relatively new to XML technologies, the easier they are to implement, the easier the learning curve; an important consideration for a freelance designer trying to balance time constraints against producing validating code in the format the client wants. Thanks for the heads up Anil, I'll certainly be checking the blog regularly!
You mention marketing as a web development trend in 2006.
On top of that, I just thought that many bigger corporates are really learning going back to the stone age in web development by properly redoing their HTMLs on their sites.
It seems to me especially being based in Asia, especially in Asia, the awareness of the internet as a lower cost platform to market businesses is growing.
Many internet marketing companies are sprewing up in Asia, China, Hongkong and Singapore over the past 1 year. The speed at this is happening and the massive increment of internet marketing company is a good thing to hear.
Nice article!
Just for your info, i also published some trends myself.
Take a peek!
http://blog.webbforce.nl
Simplicity and intuitiveness are the main criteria for any B2C web marketing type web app. The trend here is AI. User interface gloss will always be just gloss. Besides, cost is a driver, and AJAX etc just add cost for no business benefit.
AJAX is a good example of poor marketing.
It reminds me too much of the Ajax cleaner product.
Anil,
I just happened across your blog and am happy I found it. We met briefly at MashupCamp last year and I enjoyed our conversation immensely. I'm now a subscriber.
Warmest Regards,
Doug
The Web Standards movement has increasingly been gaining speed over the last couple of years. Once the preserve of a few high profile bloggers and evangelists, more and more developers have become wise to the benefits of meaningfully marked-up documents that separate content, presentation and behaviour.2005 saw a rising demand for standards based developers, both from web design agencies, and remarkably also from end clients. 2005 also saw the success of @media, Europe’s first conference devoted to web standards.
I think 2006 will be the tipping point for standards based development as more and more companies come see web standards as a core part of their process.2006 is going to see Ruby on Rails development take off in a big way, with Rails developers never short of work. There will be an increasing number of hosts offering Rails support, as well as a slew of new books on the subject.
With 2006’s focus on web applications, slick user interface and interaction design is going to become even more essential. Some applications will attempt to mimic the desktop environment, and fail abysmally. Instead the trend for simple and elegant solutions will continue.