Ali sister introduction: although most of the front-end work does not involve server, but the recent half year serverless this word and its triggered a heated discussion, deeply touched alibaba’s senior front-end technology expert Fan Xin. Having been around the front end for more than a decade, Varzai thinks Serverless could be one of the next technologies to revolutionize the front end.
Today, Farien will sort out the historical development process of Serverless and its impact on the front end, hoping to inspire the front end engineers.
The chart above shows the search trend for serverless on Google over the last 5 years, and you can see the peak in the last 6 months.
Important technological revolutions in the front-end field in history
The birth of Ajax
Let’s take a look at some of the most important points in the history of front-end technology. The first was in 2005, when Google’s Jesse James Garrett published an article called Ajax: New Approaches to Web Applications, first published the term Ajax (not exactly a new technology, just a new term) when I was a sophomore in college, and although Ajax wasn’t a new technology, it was just a wrapper around technologies like XmlHttpRequest, But this technology has been promoted by Google as a global benchmark for Web development, indirectly contributing to the popularity of rich client applications (RIA) and single-page applications (SPA), which are mostly silky experiences (partial refresh) and have been accompanied by the development of Web 2.0 and the popularity of Ajax. It makes the front-end JS work more complex and important, and the specialization is more and more detailed, which indirectly promotes the birth of the role of full-time front-end developers. Before this, Web development does not distinguish between the server side and the browser side of the work, so Ajax is the first important event in the front-end field.
Nodejs promotes front-end standardization and engineering
One of the next biggest milestones for the front end is the emergence and popularity of NodeJS (including Common JS and NPM) in 2009. Its significance for the front end is not simply that the front end can quickly write servers in JS. In my opinion, its biggest contribution is the front-end engineering promoted by CommonJS, NPM and its convenient development experience, which makes the front-end from slash-and-burn deployment mode incompatible with traditional software engineering to development mode close to traditional enterprise application. Before that, Front-end development lacks effective tools and standards in resource reference, dependency management and module specification. However, after nodeJS became popular, commonJs-based modules and NPM package deployment and dependency management became the mainstream (similar to Java maven system). NPM is the world’s largest package management repository and the de facto standard for package dependency management of front-end projects. Webpack, in turn, makes it easier to deploy front-end code, allowing the front end to distribute bundles as Java JAr-like packages, regardless of the type of resources in the project.
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