Serverless, Flutter, Vue3.0, desktop application development, applets, and WebAssembly are all expected to take off in 2019.
Four technical people bu Si, Du Huan, Hai Bo and Tang Zhu forecast the development trend of front-end in 2020, and also elaborated the challenges that front-end practitioners may face in 2020.
- Senior front end technology expert of Ant Financial, responsible person of Yuque product technology
- Du Huan senior front-end technology expert of Ali Cloud Strategy & Cooperation Department, head of R&d and upgrade project of Alibaba’s front-end Serverless economy
- Haibo Netease cloud music front-end leader
- Tang Zhengcai cloud front-end person in charge
Q1: What is the most impressive or important thing about the big front end in 2019?
** No. 4: ** As the big front end area begins to enter the deep water, more and more resources are tilted towards both ends. The Low Code area handles a lot of marketing activities and middle and back end business scenarios, while the Pro Code area uses infrastructure empowerment to improve developers’ R&D performance and support more complex R&D scenarios.
** Du Huan: ** In 2019, cloud vendors and the whole front-end developer community are actively promoting the implementation of the Serverless concept, and the prototype of the cloud + end r&d mode is emerging, and the future of the big front-end is full of more possibilities.
Hypo: * * * * operating as a front-end tool system can easily cut into the business fu scene, in the past two years have sprung up in various size factory, such as page structures, tools, and the synthesis of the material such as pictures, audio and video production tools and so on, there are some combination of visual, audio and video algorithm and recommendation algorithm intelligent case scenarios. It is believed that the intelligent expansion of operation tools in limited scenarios in 2020 will become an important track for everyone to make efforts, because the traditional drag drag production mode exists in the ceiling of efficiency improvement.
The deepest feeling of ** in the past year is that with the diversification of business and terminal, the front end has officially entered the deep water zone. While solving business problems, ** pays more attention to r&d efficiency. In the process of transforming from engineering technology benefits to platform business benefits, the front end is expanding and opening up to the upstream and downstream of traditional function category. From r&d engineering to intelligent AI+ automation exploration, Low Code on the R&D engineering link has amazing value for business. The cognition and practice of Serverless concept, the sinking of front-end research and development ability and the single application capability brought by the industry can see the trend of rapid progress from Web front-end development to Web application development.
Q2: What is the one front-end technology trend that exceeded your expectations for 2019?
** No. 4: ** My own work is actually focused on Pro Code and full stack development, but looking back 19 years later, the Low Code field has grown faster than I expected. From the early modular construction to solve the problems in the field of marketing activities, to now can solve the internal complex business needs of the middle and background through Low Code, with the combination of intelligent and front-end, Low Code and Pro Code, although it is still in the exploratory stage, But from a trend point of view it may be a general direction to improve the front end.
** Du Huan: THE implementation of ** front-end Serverless r&d mode in Alibaba’s Singles’ Day still makes me feel very shocked. Although it is only the first step, the symbolic significance of this step is very huge and obvious. Several features of future application development can be seen from the upgrade practice of Front-end Serverless R&D mode of Alibaba economy:
- Business developers no longer care about the details of machine resource application, operation and maintenance;
- Data sources will be further converged and the business layer can be freely choreographed and used;
- The front-end can complete the delivery of the entire application;
- Before and after peak flow, do not take the initiative to plan resources; Through these changes in r&d status, the business can make trial and error cheaper and more efficient.
** Hippo: ** should be a small program. In addition to AT (Ali and Tencent) small programs continue to reap the flow, daily activities hit a new high, 2B (Baidu and byte) small programs also began to show up, and even 360 also put forward the concept of desktop small programs, in the edge of the scene also want to share a slice of the pie. The technology topic of “small application cross-end” has become a requirement. For example, taro and other technical solutions are becoming more and more popular. Technical solutions have evolved from cross-web and RN to cross-small application ABCDEFG… . I have to say that while we are struggling with these little programs, we as average developers are losing focus on the Web standards themselves. However, from a purely technical point of view, applets have reference value for cross-end experience optimization, such as offline package, multi-page live Webview of independent history stack and mixed rendering of some key views, which effectively solve the pain point of pure Web experience. In addition, the W3C also published the content of the white Paper on small program standardization for the first time, and there is also the possibility of a change of direction.
In 2019, there are actually two things that exceed my expectations. One is the improvement of human efficiency due to the development of Low Code capability, from single-end to multi-end; From the early light business scene of marketing display to the present complex business scene of middle and background, and even the support of business model, link and event; Developed by the UI module of human flesh coding to intelligent UI2Code generation after practice. The other is the extensive preaching of Serverless concept and the vertical attempt of some factories. As answered in the previous question, the front-end capability is sinking and returning to the road of Web engineers, which is good for both the business and the front-end itself.
Q3: What are the most noteworthy technology trends for the big front end in 2020?
No. 4: ** As front-end frameworks and other infrastructure improve, front-end engineers may need to focus more on how to leverage this infrastructure to better solve business problems. In the field of Low Code, how to combine the products of Low Code with Pro Code to solve more complex business, and in the field of Pro Code, how to use cloud services, Serverless and other technologies to enter a broader world of full-stack RESEARCH and development are all worthy of attention and investment.
** Du Huan: ** From the perspective of the value of the front-end industry, I still think we can give priority to the upgrade of the cloud Serverless R&D mode. With the continuous enrichment of cloud underlying capabilities, cloud vendor platforms gradually provide more and more powerful free architecture and free operation and maintenance capabilities, enabling the whole society to gradually focus on business thinking, which will affect the employer’s choice of the whole R&D system construction. When employers have the opportunity to let more developers focus only on business logic development, large front-end industries with professional device-side interactive logic development and the ability to realize back-end business logic development through NodeJS and other languages will have greater opportunities, which will have a profound impact on the whole industry and deserve attention.
Haibo: **Serverless bar. Although we are trying to actively practice Node BFF internally, if we put aside the internal value of expanding functional boundaries, the effect may not be obvious in terms of final efficiency improvement. Node is more used in some non-core links (such as operation tools, monitoring platform, etc.), middle and background business, and relatively mature SSR, etc. And in the face of large flow of C-end scenes, there will be some stability risks, large factories may have enough input to guarantee, small and medium-sized factories are relatively less lucky, can only choose to repeatedly in some small scenes. Serverless, as a scientific development concept and a new cooperative division of labor mode, may reduce the development complexity of “end + service” of a module or function (or even application) to be borne by the unit of human resources, and fit the function characteristics of broad and thin front-end, so as to solve the problem of personnel base.
** I think it is Serverless. The universality and depth of influence of the reform of r&d system and ability evolution based on Serverless will exceed some students’ expectations. Serverless’s encapsulation of the underlying resources and operation and maintenance work makes the front end more focused on interaction logic, business logic and data rather than the environment itself. In the event-driven UI function + Faas, Node ability combines container and micro-service architecture, the front end is easier than before to get close to the business and service business with the posture of full stack. In the future, with the support of AI intelligence generation, Web IDE will wipe out the local environment and open up the business development and platform capabilities, and the front-end reform will be more far-reaching.
Q4: What do you think will be the biggest challenge for front-end practitioners in 2020?
With great power comes great responsibility. As the “weapons” at the front end become more powerful, the problems the front end has to solve become more complex. However, no matter how the front end develops, it comes back to the essence of “problem solving.” Whether these new “weapons” can be used to find new business scenarios, or to make previous scenarios significantly more effective, may be the next big front-end developer to think about.
* * Du Huan: * * above me more on the cloud Serverless r&d model upgrade this matter, in fact in addition to this, the direction of the front and there are many other good, intelligent, low code, and so on, for example, some of which will be help front-end tool of further liberation, some way to help front further value, but the two, They all have the same requirement for the front end: to be a business savvy developer, if it is still as simple as the original “cutting pages”, it may be the first batch of people to be eliminated in the future. And to become a proficient business developer, it will be a new topic, in addition to technology, we need to link more, think more!
** Hyber: I don’t think the challenges for 2020 will be substantially different from 2019, but let’s be modest: “How to explore the technology value of the front end in the business”, which I think is probably a permanent challenge for all business front end teams.
Front-end development systems such as Serverless are still in the idea-to-best practice phase of exploration. The biggest challenge, IN my opinion, is that driven by new ideas and practices of various parties, the gap in the perception of industry technical practitioners between the platform of dominant large factories and the average small factory will be further enlarged, and the industry dividend of junior and middle level practitioners will gradually disappear in the following years. Again, the value of technology is to solve business problems, and different stages of business require different technology packages. Embrace the business, do not look at the business from a narrow perspective, from the business perspective to r & D to the front end, focus on their own business problems, based on the scenario to find solutions can bring better growth.
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