The author | exhibition is phlogistic, benders, right
It can be said that the open source front-end field, as the right right said, has passed the year of 2019, and 2020 has started the next decade. Standing at this starting point, we look forward to the future of the front-end, and will face great changes and challenges. Honestly, what’s going to happen in the next ten years? Ten years is a long time for the Internet, for the front end, and it’s hard to imagine what it’s going to look like in ten years, but something is happening along the way.
TypeScript is currently politically correct but ultimately language-agnostic
There is no doubt that TypeScript will be mainstream for a long time to come. Most of the major open source front-end projects have already embraced TypeScript, or are in the process of embracing it. It gives us many of the advanced features of object-oriented, strongly typed languages that help us improve the quality of our code and reduce the cost and risk of team collaboration. If our project hasn’t turned around yet, it’s time to do it.
But the quality of an open source project is not directly related to the language itself, and TypeScript itself is still a “weakly typed” language with “static type checking”. OO is not required, and elegant encapsulation and inheritance can be written with native JS. It is even more anticipated that when the potential of WebAssembly is fully realized, the front end will be language independent, and the front end will be the product of human-computer interface development.
The evolution of browser technology and cloud computing will accelerate the revolution in front-end building and resource loading
The official release of Webpack 5 greatly improves build performance through physical caching and will continue to be a mainstream build tool in the near term. However, with ES Modules becoming the mainstream, CJS fading out, ESM CDN being widely used, building tools will turn to Bundless, and Webpack will inevitably gradually withdraw from the historical stage. Especially with the advent of HTTP/2, support for request and response multiplexing, HTTP header fields will be greatly compressed, and transmission efficiency will be greatly improved. At that time, we will no longer need to merge resource files, and build tools will also accelerate evolution.
C/S to B/S to C/S
The Internet, especially the cloud, has moved software from C/S to B/S, and even WebAssembly, which allows us to move old client software to the browser at a much lower cost, seems to be moving towards B/S. However, we are also seeing another trend. The huge apps like wechat, Alipay and Facebook are converging browser software to their clients. The typical technology behind this is applets, PWA, and we are even seeing applets on PC clients. With the help of projects like Electron, many B/S software services are launching their own clients to seek more focused user experience. Especially, many traditional C/S software services are more suitable for users. This is the historical cycle we have seen, but the following C/S process is completely different from the technology used in the past C/S, whether it is small program, PWA, Service Worker, Electron, the open source project on the Client side will usher in a spring.
Emerging interaction scenarios will evoke Micro UI
The Micro Frontend tends to flourish, but it is the frontend of a controversial Microservice Architecture that has been around for years, helping us solve complex application development and maintenance problems. In human-computer interaction, how to find a UI that users need most at this moment in a complex product is still a problem that has not been well solved. Users often get lost in the complex UI of a large APP, but most of the time we just need a UI that can efficiently complete a certain job, let’s call it Micro UI. In science fiction and movies such as Galactic Empire, we can often see a kind of dark technology called “information window”, and each information window is a Micro UI. With the continuous advancement of AI, AR, VR and IOT, devices will become more and more understanding of people, and the presentation of information and data will become more and more vivid. Some of these things that only appear in science fiction will become reality in the next 10 years. This kind of UI development mode will also bring qualitative changes to the front-end development mode.
RPA & Marchine Driven UI
In the age of AI and IOT, if you insist that applications must be designed and developed by professionals, and users actively use the Web through their mobile phones, you have a better chance of surviving the future.
RPA, an ancient technology that was active in game add-on in ancient times, is being upgraded with the rapid development of AI and standardized products. Tools such as UiPath, Zapier, Microsoft Power Platform, AND UI Bot are changing the way many industries work. Smart assistants, such as Google Assistant, are changing the way people use computers. As a front end, we need to think about UI not only being consumed by humans, but also by machines, and even just describing your intentions, which really requires an efficient way for your application to be driven by robots. Even the application is no longer the one we see today, but a robot, and we provide: RPA robot building tools, rPA-driven standard UI. How to design and implement a UI that can be used by both robots and humans is a big challenge for us.
Graphics will continue to be an interface hotspot
Although brain-computer interaction has been incubated in the laboratory, eyes will still be the main channel for humans to obtain information from the outside world in the next decade. Graphics can clearly and effectively convey information ten or even ten thousand times faster than words. This is a powerful visual thinking instinct that humans have acquired over a long period of evolution. In the next decade with more and more rich data and more and more diverse use scenarios, there will still be a strong demand for efficient insights from data, and the front end, which is closest to the requirements of data visualization capability model, will still be the main force in this field. , on the other hand, in the future there will be a new “screen”, whether it is a real screen under the IOT or VR, AR under virtual screen, now has a complete and standardized drawing API the best chance of being adopted new “screen” priority support and on the basis of the use of graphics technology to realize a new UI infrastructure or even the language is possible.
Front-end intelligence
Front in recent years has been trying to promote efficiency, visualization research and development, set up system, engineering & tools, end many solutions and so on all is in order to solve the efficiency, but the ceiling has emerged, the next step will introduce intelligent ability, in the original technical system & products, injection of natural language recognition, image recognition ability, and make the efficiency of a series of qualitative change, To break through this ceiling. At a larger level, the application of intelligent ability to solve problems in work will gradually become a necessary ability and way of thinking for the front end.
Even if you don’t want to be affected by artificial intelligence, in fact, you have to accept and start to learn artificial intelligence. A large number of banners and marketing campaign pages, as simple as thousands of pages, have been produced purely through artificial intelligence automation, without the front-end involvement in research and development. Complex forms, tables, charts display can also be provided by providing interface intelligence to deduce the best page implementation, only need a line of code to enter data can be a visual chart, even from the design draft directly generated pages will become a reality. It’s never too late to start, but it’s too late not to start.
End to end r&d
With the gradual completion of cloud native and business platform capabilities, it has gradually become a trend for front-end to use Serverless capabilities to complete end-to-end research and development. Behind this trend, there are two challenges: one is to extend existing tools and platforms to Serverless. While supporting Serverless, End-to-end integration must be considered, including: r&d tools, monitoring systems, quality systems, and so on; On the other hand, there are new requirements for personnel’s own ability and consciousness. Changes will be found in the functional boundaries and capabilities of the front end position.
Based on front-end intelligence and end-to-end research and development direction, it is the most attractive project on front-end open source in the future; At the overall level, projects with an attractive front end have two characteristics:
1. Put forward new ideas and thoughts on the existing related systems; As frameworks, build libraries and other infrastructure converge, the number of similar repetitive open source projects will decrease, but innovation will not stop until more attention and recognition is given to projects that are capable of bringing new ideas and ideas to the infrastructure.
2. Create links with other fields based on existing relevant systems; Some technologies, such as WebAssembly, are not necessarily new, but are getting renewed attention in the front-end industry today as people discover new uses for them. Future projects and designs that combine existing front-end technologies with other technology areas will receive more attention from the open source community.
This is the second article in the front-end series. The previous article, “Front-end Production: A Review of the Past 10 Years and the Next 10 Years,” will continue in the next two weeks. Comments have been received: live, micro front-end, AI, data structures…… Will be produced in succession, dig friends if you like this article can give Bozan duck! ღ(´ · ᴗ · ‘)