Tencent expert engineer: in 2020, what are the keywords of front-end development?

Today, front-end development shines in many fields, such as Node.js, browsers, clients, small programs, small games, IOT, etc. The breadth is unprecedented, no matter in which field, more or less reflects everyone’s pursuit of r&d efficiency. When it comes to r&d efficiency, no one can ignore the influence of Serverless. In the future, it may make a breakthrough to improve r&d efficiency, just like CDN, and become the front-end infrastructure. “

— Youkunhuang, head of QQ basic Web front-end, expert engineer

2019 has already gone more than half way. Every time you look at the future development of the front end at the end of the year, you will find that the key words are different every year, which is the speed of change of the front end.

Looking back:

Looking back this year, several big direction is very clear, in terms of basic language and framework, with the growing a lot of front-end team and business complexity, scale more and more depend on the type of system and object-oriented programming support, Typescript adopted by more and more developers, difficulty is not great, landing obvious efficiency, in addition, The three front-end frameworks have matured, stabilized, and standardized, and Typescript support is becoming more and more complete. Typescript+ frameworks have become standard on many front-end teams’ stacks.

In terms of small programs, this year is still a year of rapid progress in small programs, major mainstream apps are online small program ability support, each front-end team also have a special small program development team, in order to adapt to faster small program development needs, at the same time, many key functions in the App are replaced by small programs, Even some apps have become Native small program shell, the upper application implementation is all small programs, here the benefits are also obvious;

In terms of cross-side development, RN ecosystem has been very mature, or there is not much prospect for development. Many teams turned to Flutter of Google Ecosystem, especially the first Release of Flutter for Web, which rekindled the hope of the front end of the Web. Apple has also released a new UI system for its own ecosystem — SwiftUI. SwiftUI is definitely a big innovation for developers who suffer from Apple UI system, just waiting for the popularity of iOS13. Meanwhile, SwiftUI for Web is already on the way in the open source community. Can SwiftUI for Android be Far behind?

On the front end engineering side, the most important basic skill for developers is to use tools to improve efficiency, and front-end developers are getting ahead of themselves in this area. This year, many teams are building complete front End DevOps process toolsets, and some teams are starting to collaborate with each other, whether it’s Web or applets. From new projects, development, joint investigation, deployment, testing, release, operation and maintenance to monitoring statistics, there are perfect tools to ensure and improve efficiency, and front-end engineering will be more and more standardized in the future.

Outlook:

Every innovation or breakthrough of front-end research and development mode is due to some transformative technologies. Looking forward to the next one or two years, the perceived technological changes include cloud computing and 5G. Let’s talk about the possible breakthrough direction of front-end from these two aspects.

Cloud computing is not a new technology. For many growth companies, they may have been born in the cloud, but for big companies, they really moved all their business to the cloud, that is, last year to this year. Using the native cloud is not as simple as migrating servers. Have to mention this year’s “hot” Serverless, this year any Internet technology conference will not be absent from the topic. Why Serverless? Because Serverless perfectly supports Node.js, Serverless helps front-end developers solve many problems in the process of using Node.js. Front-end development no longer needs to pay too much attention to the operation and maintenance of the server, and the operation and maintenance cost is greatly reduced. It’s safe, scalable, cheap on a pay-per-view basis, and front-end developers have less to care about and more to do as they focus on developing the business and implementing the business logic. Serverless will also change the front-end research and development model. I believe that with Node.js becoming a necessary skill for front-end developers, the continuous popularity of cloud computing makes Serverless within reach. Some back-end tasks that can be done by the front-end should be decided to be done by front-end developers in the perspective of r&d efficiency. Once you get a taste of efficiency, there will be more and more changes, but how much change depends on the determination of the front-end developers.

About 5G, every day news is overwhelming, 5G into our daily life is just around the corner, and 5G will bring what changes to the Web front-end development? First of all, 5 g bandwidth surge brought to further improve the complexity of the traditional Web page, like a page in the process of 2 g to 4 g change from WAP pure text hyperlinks to the 4 g era full picture video era, 5 g for pages change will is huge, but certainly not happen overnight, because the corresponding facilities also need to gradually improve, For example, hardware performance and browser processing speed, and server rendering (SSR) is certainly a shortcut, light front end heavy background, 5G is a bridge, put rendering in the background, it is not so simple isothermal, need to pay attention to and optimize rendering performance, WebAssembly may get rapid development under this opportunity, Because it can seamlessly docking background languages, and the optimization of background rendering will also bring the front page research and development mode and technical architecture change; Second, 5 g of interconnected all things, and will bring different from smartphones and the diversification of ordinary PC new application scenarios, VR, wearable devices, automotive systems, smart and intelligent interactive projection and so on will take the Web into a variety of vertical, such as light VR this field there is very much needed to explore and perfect place, It also means a lot more space on the front end.

Other aspects, the flow of business, as long as the flow of small programs, small program is still the focus of the next year and key input object, everybody poking fun at the performance of the current problems, are also expected to be resolved, such as using Flutter train of thought to optimize the small program, trust has been on the road, at the same time, the small program isomorphism is worth looking forward to, It really solves part of the developer’s pain point, in addition, small program engineering will have more tools to support; Flutter on JS, SwiftUI for Web&Android will be something to look forward to in the open source ecosystem as there is still no perfect solution for Flutter.

The front-end has no boundaries, each team has different technical focus, and the future of the front-end cannot be clearly explained in this short article. Front-end developers are constantly expanding the frontier of the front-end, exploring more fields, hoping to generate greater value, which is the charm of the front-end.

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— Joltwang Technology director, Ministry of Education, expert engineer