EphronTech

Popular Web Development Languages 2018

Times change pretty fast in the tech world. A gadget which was hot and desirable a year ago loses its glamour in the current of stiff competition, innovations and new launches. Startups and tech providers need to keep resurrecting themselves with new, usable and desirable products.

A similar trend applies to programming languages as well. These languages are the frontrunners in the evolution of innovation.  Things get evolved so fast in the tech industry, that if we don’t stay atop of it, we would stand last in the line looking for opportunities.

So, let us take a short and crisp look into the most desirable or valuable coding languages that would revolutionize the web development genre in the next few years.

Github’s Octoverse Report does provide a clear-cut standing of what lies where, but this is usually for experts who want to cross-develop themselves with learning multiple coding stuff. This blog here is for job seekers,  onlookers, new tech entrants and also who what want to weigh-in their tech expertise and cross expand.

Now let us take a pep look at some of the most popular languages and some contextual insights on the role they play in web development.

As many know and few don’t, the web development process can be broken up into two blocks: The front-end and the back-end.

On the front-end (or user-side), you have everything a user sees and communicates or interacts with a webpage. On the back-end (or server-side) you have the server that stores the data in some database technology.

WEB FUNDAMENTALS

Web fundamentals are simply nothing but  HTML and CSS layers found on all web pages on the internet.

HTML

HTML is the standard markup language of the web.

HTML markup on text document describes the structure of a webpage to the web browser via tags, that is the text between the <angle-brackets>. These tags tell the browser how to present page elements like titles, headings, text, and links that are included in the HTML document.

CSS

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a style-sheet language. It gives developers flexibility and control over elements such as the color, fonts, layout, and overall design of a webpage. By separating presentation (CSS) from a structure (HTML) into style sheets, designs can be shared across multiple pages or tailored to suit various devices and environments.

Together, these two languages are all you need to know to provide the structure and style of a static website. But nowadays dynamic sites is what we all look at. More advanced client-side and server-side scripting languages provide a whole new range of features allowing for more interactive websites that can be tailored to each new visitor.

CLIENT-SIDE SCRIPTING

Client-side scripting—HTML and CSS included—is any code that runs in the browser of the device a person is using to view a website. The browser temporarily downloads the code it needs to display a webpage from a web server, then processes it independently from that server. As long as the browser remains open, we will be able to view the static page even if they lose their Internet connection. If the site must respond to user events that require external data, like search queries, then the client will need to make a request to the server over the Internet.

JavaScript

JavaScript is currently the default client-side scripting language for bringing interactivity to web development—sliders, pop-up screens, drop-down menus, animations, games. Alongside HTML and CSS, it’s one of the core technologies behind the front-end of a website. JavaScript running on the client-side is why some sites can remain interactive even after dropping Internet connection.

There a  few JavaScript frameworks and libraries and frameworks that make a front-end or UI developer work easier.

So popular ones are,

Angular

React

Ember

Vue

jQuery

SERVER-SIDE SCRIPTING

A website is simply a collection of files that describe the images, text, formatting, graphics, and logic that club together to provide some user experience. Server-side scripting simply refers to the code that runs behind the scenes on the server that hosts those files and is responsible for everything from effective database management to the service layer of APIs that handle the data transfer that makes a website lively.

Java

Initially released by Sun Microsystems in the 90s, Java is a widely used general-purpose programming language. You know  Android’s base is on Java, but it also has a long history as a server-side technology started with  Java Servlets, JSP (Java Server Pages), and Web Objects are examples of server-side solutions that use Java.

Some popular sites that boast high traffic such as  Alibaba, Linkedin and Chase use Java. The other reason is that Java has evolved a lot to be a  mature programming language, with developer contributions that have a long history of use in applications across the software development spectrum.

Python

It is an open-source stuff, interpreted language that places an emphasis on highly readable code, Python is the general purpose programming language. Python has a wide standard library loaded with pre-coded functions for every need, which allows developers to do more with fewer lines of code. Again a high-performance service, where it can be used to process large datasets making it a favorite among startups such as  Pinterest and Instagram.

Ruby

Ruby is much similar to Python, influenced by PERL, is object-oriented general purpose languages in use for high-performance services.

Ruby on Rails is the open-source framework, it is one of the widely in use back-end powerhouse today It’s an open-source MVC framework allowing developers to quickly bootstrap projects based on proven best practices.  Twitter came ti existence with it and migrated to Blender and Java.  Basecamp, Shopify are on Ruby.

C#

C# is a programming language hybrid of C and C++ used to develop software for the .NET platform — a framework for building and running applications and XML web services. Microsoft came with it.  If you’re building websites or apps for the Microsoft ecosystem, C# is the way to go.  Microsoft’s own websites/products are on it.

PHP

The  2017 W3Tech market report, more than 80% of websites are on PHP. Released in 1995, PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language making it apt for web templating and content management systems. Some high-performance PHP frameworks are Zend, Symfony, laravel. CMS’s include WordPress and Joomla. WordPress is the most popular DIY CMS in market today.

Go

By Google and also known as GoLang was released in 2009 to solve Google’s data storage problems. The goal was to create a language tailored towards scalability that combines the clean concise code of higher-level programming languages like Ruby/Python with the performance and efficiency of lower-level programming languages like C/C++. Besides Google, Adobe, BBC, and IBM are among the major websites that are powered by Go.

Swift

Apple released it in 2014, Swift’s became popular in a short period of time (now at #10 on the TIOBE Index in March 2017). Swift is a general-purpose programming language with simple syntax structures. While Swift is most well known for building native apps for Apple devices, it can also be used as a server-side technology with frameworks such as Vapor.

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