React, Flux, GraphQL, Hack, HHVM...? All of this and more!
WebAssembly slowly started to seep into the minds of mainstream web developers. The lower level alternative to JavaScript now runs natively in major browsers. Streamin Compilation is a technique that can accelerate execution WebAssembly (aka Wasm) significantly.
In a recent Pull Request of TypeScript an interesting feature is coming to the language in 2018. Conditional Typing allows defining types based on conditions, adding more flexibility to the JavaScript based language.
Microservices have been a recent megatrend. Everyone from start-ups to enterprises and internet giants are talking about them. The manageability of microservices is not trivial. Google is well aware of this, and is workin on a project that uses GraphQL to merge microservices behind a single API.
Drupal is a popular Open Source CMS. The project is over 17 years old and it is showing in it's architecture. Constant expansion of features has left the admin interface lacking to contemporary rivals.
In 2017 project lead Dried Buytaert signalled Drupal will use React.js to salvage the user experience.
The Polymer team at Google working on the Web Components library has sent out a new version of their library. This is a significant step following the change of architecture of Polymer in August 2017.
The headless CMS market is exploding, and there are some interesting open source alternatives like Directus and soon GraphCMS. Contentful is in the lead for proprietary options, but there is room for open source. Another new option is GraphQL enabled Gentics Mesh.
The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities shook the computing world in early 2018. Now there are reportedly two more, with details incoming in the days after embargo in place for security.
Curiously the two new vulnerabilities have James Bond movie inspired names: Skyfall and Solace.
Strong typing is a trend that has enjoyed growth in the contemporary development scene. Technologies like MobX State Tree, TypeScript and GraphQL all provide this feature to JavaScript ecosystems.
There are numerous ways of bootstrapping Single Page Apps that user React.js for the UI layer. The Create React App (CRA) is one option, which comes from the Facebook developer team. Now this popular project adds standard CSS Modules support for styling components.
React and TypeScript are an effective combination, but since the React is developed by Facebook in Flow (their strongly typing JavaScript technique), it's not always as easy as it could be.