The field of Web Application Development is seeing some significant changes in 2024. As with anything internet related, change happens quickly and trends that exist in 2024 were not but mere concepts five years ago.
Many of the “trends for web application development” articles for 2024 have many of the same topics, but as highlighted in the prismic.io article, the most significant trends are currently:
- Adding AI functionality to applications
- AI-based Developer tools
- Serverless Architectures
- Jamstack
- Animated UI and engaging UX
- Dark Mode
- TypeScript Adoption
- Component-Driven Design and Development
- Headless CMSs with a visual experience
- API-First Development
Probably the most significant and disruptive trends are the those that utilize Artificial Intelligence. In the Prismic article, the top two trends cited involve utilizing AI.
While the first subject involved adding AI functionality, such as AI driven chat bots, this concept has been around for the better part of five years. The concept of having AI answering basic questions to drive customers to specific sales funnels has been growing since 2017, however with the rapid adoption of large language models such as ChatGPT, and the Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that allow developer to create their own chat integrations that can intelligently converse with users, the potential for this type of integration has grown significantly over the last two years.
The second subject, which also involves AI, is where the tools that developers use to build web applications are now using AI to complete parts of the application based upon simple instructions. Tools such as GitHub co-pilot are being used more and more often to speed up the development of application development. The downside to these types of tools is that these AI enabled solutions can include open-source code, which in some companies, such as those that are closed-source code based, is not permitted. To include open-source code into a closed-source code system can jeopardize the copyright and ownership of the web application.
Overall, the remaining trends tend to be a progression of trends that have existed in some form or another for the previous set of years, often focusing on deployment and design.
Leave a Reply