React, Flux, GraphQL, Hack, HHVM...? All of this and more!
At Google I/O in 2016 there were two browser focused technologies from the company. These are the Polymer project and Angular 2. It might be a bit hard to make sense of why the company is investing in these two overlapping and competing projects.
Riot is a lightweight library for building user interfaces. It springs out of the Muut project which is similar to Disqus, for example. This is why the library is needs to be lightweight and work with a lot of other technologies.
The name GraphQL might suggest that it's a language for working with Graph Databases, similar to SQL for relational databases. But GraphQL is actually a technology that is meant for high level communications between applications that can (but don't have to) connect to a Graph Database.
Headless CMSes have been a hot topic for a number of years. In addition to pure platforms that offer a content API, there are also numerous CMSes with a public API that can be used to power a rich front end application.
Directus is a new player in the Content as a Service field. With many options for available for decoupling with a headless CMS, there is an abundance of options out there for people and organizations looking for a robust Content Platform. Is Directus worth a look and what advantage does it hold over more established players?
The logic and complexity of web applications has largely transferred to clients. Still you need a backend to persist your data, do validation and so on. Reindex a new entry to the BaaS market, but it has embraced GraphQL from the beginning.
With Falcor and GraphQL the wealth of custom built application REST API specific APIs is fast coming a thing of the past. What is still missing is a general purpose layer library to use these protocols in your front end applications.
XML has largely been ousted by JSON as the de-facto format for transferring data. XML remains a valid format for document annotations, but RESTful APIs serving lean JSON is where the action has been for a number of years.
The german hotel search site Trivago is apparently investing in their own Virtual DOM library. With the Virtual DOM concept popularised by React.js from Facebook - there was certainly no lack of similar efforts in 2015.
In todays API driven world there are plenty of acronyms that sound alien to the average Joe. In fact many of these technologies and their differences are vague to developers alike. Let's look at three data formats that build on JSON: GraphQL, JSON-LD and JSON Schema.