Interesting frontend technologies to follow

The world of web development is constantly changing and it is a challenge to keep a close eye on everything that is going on. Which frameworks will still be relevant in the coming year? And which tools are most suitable for your web application? Let’s discuss a couple of interesting frontend technologies for web development.

Image by Marvin Meyer

Svelte

The big underdog of the frontend frameworks: Svelte. It’s been around for a couple of years and in April 2019 version 3.00 was released. Svelte is a little different than React, Vue or Angular because it compiles your code to tiny, framework-less vanilla JS. And it’s not just very performant, with no run-time dependencies, it’s also very elegant and easy to learn the framework. It’s npm downloads have more than tripled over the last year, and in the results of the 2019 State of JS survey, it showed that 44.9% of JS developers were interested in learning Svelte. Time has to tell if people will actually adopt it in production applications, so I’m curious about what the future will bring for Svelte.

Expo & React Native

React Native, the framework for building native mobile apps with React has had a steady growth in the last couple of years. The 2019 State of JS survey from 2019 showed that last year 27.9% had used React Native and would use it again, together with 44.3% that was interested in learning React Native. I have been using React Native to build the mobile apps of RaterFox, and really enjoyed it. It was easy to pick up because I already built the frontend of RaterFox with React. One thing that's kind of annoying right now, is that I’m managing 2 codebases that really look alike. Especially all Redux code is mostly the same for the website as the mobile app. Luckily for me, the React Native teams have even bigger plans than just building for Android and IOS with one codebase. What about building for mobile, web and desktop, all with React Native? Sounds too good to be true, but it is very real. Expo, an open-source platform for making React Native apps, is on a mission to create the best possible end-to-end developer experiences for building and deploying apps on multiple platforms. I would definitely keep an eye out for Expo and highly recommend this talk from Evan Bacon about Expo for mobile, web, desktop and console…