It’s said that every week a couple of new front-end frameworks are released. Without a doubt, it’s hard to keep up in such a very dynamic environment. Because of that, we’ve come up with a list of front-end development trends for 2022 year.
Front-end technologies trends
Progressive Web App (PWA)
According to research1, people are spending more and more time using mobile devices. It’s now more important to give the user an app with a look and feel that is natural and works excellent on mobile devices. Progressive Web Apps are web applications that behave like native mobile applications. Their main features are offline mode, fast loading, and good performance (using caches). The major benefit of PWA applications is that publishing to the App Store or Google Play is optional, which simplifies the process of distributing the app to your clients.
In 2021 a lot has changed in the PWA ecosystem and PWA should continuously be picked and adapted by many companies which are searching for a way to develop, maintain and add features to a single codebase that runs on almost any platform. It’s not only for web pages but also for feature-rich web applications.
AI (Voice recognition, chat apps)
Today a lot of web applications provide chat powered by AI to their user interface. It has become an ideal way to provide answers to customers’ questions and also help to set long-term relationships between the company and customers. It could also use voice recognition to add a more human-like customer experience to the application.
Web assembly
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. You can write apps in the language you prefer and then compile them to a WASM file to run in browsers. A lot of languages are currently supported by WebAssembly like C/C++, Elixir, Rust, Python, Go, C#/.Net, Java, and more2.
Web assembly supports more and more features and web browsers, so it’s something that it’s good to follow.
Typescript
Typescript could be described in a few words as “Javascript that scales”. It’s a strongly typed programming language that builds on Javascript. It’s hard to develop large web applications without the tools and type of safety it provides. As surveys say, it’s becoming a more and more popular choice for the vast majority of software development projects.
Micro state managers
There are a lot of solid-state management libraries like Redux, but the boilerplate it produces is something hard to swallow for small-scaled use cases. Here come small state management libraries with simple concepts. In this article, we will focus on three popular micro-state management libraries: XState, Recoil, and Hookstate.
XState is a library that provides an easy way to introduce machine-based states to Javascript applications. Its strong selling point is an easy way to visualize states in the application which could help in communication between business and developers.
Recoil is a state management library created mainly for React apps with the same patterns in mind. It’s described as minimal, fast, and flexible.
Hookstate is the library that uses React Hooks API to create easy, fast, and feature-rich solutions for managing the state.
Micro-frontends and super apps
Micro-frontends is a concept to think about web applications as a composition of features (applications) that are owned by independent teams. On the other hand, Super app is a concept to embed independent features (applications) in one application which provides an easy way for companies to access customers without building complicated infrastructure and solutions.
At the end of 2020 Webpack, which is the most popular bundler for the web, the team released version 5 with the main feature called Module Federation which allows in an easy way to build Micro-frontends solutions. Because of this and mentioned benefits, the micro-frontend and super apps trend gained attention in 2021 and it will probably continue getting popular in 2022.
Front-end development frameworks
React
React is the most popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Because of its principle, ease and flexibility it is the main choice for a lot of web developers.
In 2021 React team announced a plan for version 18, which will bring a lot of new features like automatic batching, new APIs, and a new streaming server renderer with build-in support for React.lazy. This could only extend the popularity and usage of this library in 2022.
Vue.js
Vue.js is another JS framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications. It’s described as easy to learn, performant, and feature-rich framework. It’s concentrated on providing an incrementally adaptable architecture that focuses on declarative rendering and component composition. As stack overflow trends show it’s getting more and more popular and trying to overthrow mature solutions like Angular. In 2021 a new major version (3.0) was released which introduces several new features like Teleport, Fragment, and Composition API.
Svelte
As said in the beginning a lot of JS libraries and frameworks are there, but some are more interesting than others and keep gaining popularity. A good example is Svelte which is described as a radical new approach to building user interfaces. It shifts the work from the browser into a compile step that happens when you build your app (no Virtual DOM and many more!). It’s something you need to check as other developers who voted for Svelte as the most loved web framework in 20213.
Static site generators
In the end, it’s worth mentioning that static site generators like NextJS, Hugo, and Gatsby are getting more and more popular. Its features are developed quickly and right now there are a lot of very performant, customizable, and SEO-friendly solutions. Server-side rendering has never been more easy and powerful than these days and it’s worth being up to date with it.
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The future of frontend web development
Trends in front-end development are easier to notice. As a front-end web developer, you can immediately identify functionality and check what that website uses. That’s why it’s also important for front-end developers to be aware of the most recent rapidly changing technologies. To create successful and performant applications, it’s great to swiftly learn and incorporate the best ones into the tech stack.
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