A Recap of Frontend Development in 2019

I noted Trey Huffine’s 2018 version of this article in The Great Divide.

To put a point on this divide a bit more, consider this article by Trey Huffine, “A Recap of Frontend Development in 2018.” It’s very well done! It points to big moments this year, shows interesting data, and makes predictions about what we might see next year. But it’s entirely based around the JavaScript ecosystem.

My point was (and still is) that front-end development is more than the JavaScript ecosystem. However, I certainly admit the movings-and-shakings of the JavaScript world is a big deal and probably generally more interesting to watch for most devs.

What happened this year outside of JavaScript land? Well it’s weird. Things move slower, so it’s harder to pin things — even to years — quite as easily. For example, there was plenty of talk and usage of prefers-reduced-motion in CSS, but we kinda “got” that in 2017. Lots of people have gotten excited about variable fonts this year, but that’s also been years in the making. Subgrid recently dropped in Firefox, so I guess that’s a 2019 thing, but we’ll see slow adoption of it for years to come. For more of this exciting (but not necessarily brand new) stuff, check out Adam Argyle and Una Kravets Chrome Dev Summit 2019 presentation.

HTML is evolving at an even slower pace. Occasionally, something will feel new. I got excited about <dialog> this year, even though it first appeared in 2014, but the experts are saying we probably shouldn’t use it. Elements like <details> are getting more exciting as Edge-goes-Chromium because they’ll be getting more cross-browser support, but it’s no picnic. There’s just not much exciting to talk about in HTML, at least to me, aside from sort of philosophical approaches to it, like JAMstack.

The two most exciting HTML things to me: native lazy loading and no-jank fluid image loading.

But back to Trey’s post, the highlights are:

• React is huge. jQuery isn’t falling.
• Hooks was a huge release and change for React, and React is generally pushing fast on lots of big stuff.
• TypeScript continues to grow.
• Vue 3 is a long time coming and a bit controversial.
• Svelte 3 is a small player but has lots of interest.
• Angular 9 is almost here and has a strong base.
• JavaScript itself continues to have yearly releases. ES2019 has nice stuff and ES2020 is even better.
• Flutter is challenging React Native for cross-platform development, an impressive feat since there are so many more React devs than Dart devs.
• JAMstack, PWAs, GraphQL, and CSS-in-JS are all growing in usage and developer sentiment.
• VS Code is dominant.

Trey also picked out some really great blog posts and presentations from the year at the end, so don’t miss those!

If you dig predictions, then you might be interested in Sean Goresht’s big one for 2020.

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