What has me really excited about building websites recently is the fact that we, as front-end developers, have the power to do so much more. Only a few years ago, I would need a whole team of developers to accomplish what can now be done with just a few amazing tools.
Although the projects/tools/technologies are almost endless, in this article I’d like to talk about the top three that have me the most excited about building websites today, and for the future.
Serverless and the JAMstack
Serverless functions, which are really just server-side functions that you don’t host yourself, have been around for a few years, but they’ve really picked up in the past year or so. They allow us to host simple node functions that don’t require a permanent state and can be called from a frontend website the way we would call any other server-side API.
Serverless functions have really changed the game for me and I like to think that they did for frontend developers what sites like Squarespace did for non-developers. For the latter group, they no longer need a developer to build something simple like a portfolio website. For us frontend developers, we no longer need a backend developer to accomplish tasks like creating a contact form on a website. Things that really we should never have needed a whole API to do in the first place!
The popularity of serverless functions has led to the creation of a new tech stack: JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (JAMstack). I really love the concept of the JAMstack because it’s a move to more static, performant, websites, which I’m a big fan of. If you want to learn more about this stack, JAMstack_conf is a great conference to attend. I spoke at this year’s conference in San Francisco about using headless Chrome and Cloudinary to create progressively enhanced dynamic content (long title, I know). You can watch my talk below.
Project Fugu
Project Fugu is an initiative started by the Chromium team to bring to the web as many capabilities that are available to native applications as possible. A lot of these features are small and incremental, but the sum of the parts is going to make a huge change in the way we build progressive web applications.
One of the APIs I’m really looking forward to is the Native File System API, which will allow users of websites the ability to grant access to files on their system. A great use case for this would be Figma, the online interface design tool. Instead of having files “saved” online-only, they could directly work with files on your machine, the same way that native applications do!
Some other APIs I think are interesting are:
- Wake Lock API – will allow websites to prevent the device from dimming or falling asleep
- Contacts Picker API – will allow websites to access contacts from the user’s device
- Get Installed Related Apps API – will allow websites to check if a native application is ins
You can view the full list of APIs.
CSS Houdini
Although Houdini isn’t exactly ready yet, it’s probably the technology I am most excited for as a lover of CSS because I believe it will be a true game-changer in how we build websites.
Houdini is a collection of APIs that exposes “hooks” into certain parts of the browser’s rendering engine. This gives us low-level access to the different stages that which CSS is applied, allowing us to essentially create our own CSS!
A great example of this is using the Layout Houdini API to create the infamous masonry layout as a new value for the display property. Once these APIs are out, the possibilities for what we will be able to create will be endless!
