9 Web Technologies Every Web Developer Must Know in 2019

Web development comes with a huge set of rules and techniques every website developer should know about. If you want a website to look and function as you wish them to, you need to get familiar with web technologies that will help you achieve your goal.

Developing an app or a website typically comes down to knowing 3 main languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And while it sounds quite complicated, once you know what you are doing, understanding web technology and the way it works becomes significantly easier.

We present you with an introduction to web technologies and the latest web technologies list hoping it will make things at least a bit easier for you. Let’s take a look.

What is Web Technology?

You have probably heard the term “web development technologies” before, but did you ever think about what it actually means?

Since the computers can’t communicate with each other the way people do, they require codes instead. Web technologies are the markup languages and multimedia packages computers use to communicate.

1. Browsers

Browsers request information and then they show us in the way we can understand. Think of them as the interpreters of the web. Here are the most popular ones:

Google Chrome – Currently, the most popular browser brought to you by Google

Safari – Apple’s web browser

Firefox – Open-source browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation

Internet Explorer – Microsoft’s browser

2. HTML & CSS

HTML is the one of the one you should learn first. Thanks to HTML, the web browsers know what to show once they receive the request. If you want to better understand how HTML works, you also need to know what CSS is.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on the screen.

3. Web Development Frameworks

Web development frameworks are a starting point of items that a developer can use to avoid doing the simple or mundane tasks, and instead get right to work.

Angular

Angular is one of the latest web technologies designed specifically for developing dynamic web applications. With this framework, you can easily create front-end based applications without needing to use other frameworks or plugins.

The features include well-made templates, MVC architecture, code generation, code splitting etc. All the expressions are like code snippets that enclosed within curly braces and do not use any loops or conditional statements.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a server-side website technology that makes app development much easier and faster. The thing that really sets this framework apart is the reusability of the code as well as some other cool features that will help you get the job done in no time.

Popular websites written with Ruby include Basecamp, Ask.fm, GitHub, 500px, and many others.

Here is everything you need to know about Ruby on Rails.

YII

Yii is an open-source web application development framework built in PHP5. It is performance optimized and comes with a number of great tools for debugging and app testing. Another plus is that it is pretty simple and easy to use.

Meteor JS

Meteor JS is written in Node.js and it makes it possible for you to to create real-time web applications for different platforms. The framework for creating simple websites for personal use really stand out with Meteor JS.

This is an open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework which also means that the webpage loading time is significantly shorter. JavaScript stack also makes it possible to get the same results with fewer lines of code than usually.

Express.js

Developed in Node.js, Express.js is a web app development network that is great for those who need to develop apps and APIs as fast as possible. A lot of great features are provided with the help of plugins.

Zend

Zend is an open-source framework based on PHP, focused on building more secure and reliable web apps and services.

Django

Django is one of the most popular frameworks written in Python and follows the MVC architecture. It makes the app development process much easier thanks to its simplicity.

Check out more popular Python frameworks.

Laravel

Laravel is a PHP development framework ideal for small websites. It comes with a number of useful features including the MVC support, object-oriented libraries, Artisan, authorization technique, database migration etc.

It is one of our favorite PHP frameworks.

4. Programming Languages

As we explained before, since computers don’t use languages that are anything like human languages, they need a different way to communicate. Here are some of the most popular programming languages:

Javascript – used by all web browsers, Meteor, and lots of other frameworks

CoffeeScript – a “dialect” of JavaScript. It is viewed as simpler but it converts back into JavaScript

Python – used by the Django framework as well as in the majority of mathematical calculations

Ruby – used by the Ruby on Rails framework

PHP – used by WordPress

Go – newer language, built for speed

Swift – Apple’s newest programming language

Java – used by Android and a lot of desktop application.

So let’s talk about the most popular ones in a bit more detail.

JavaScript

According to StackOverflow’s annual survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language with 62.5% of respondents claiming to use it.

It is one of the core web technologies and if you want to learn more about it, you can find a web development tutorial with the basic tips on the JS website.

Ruby

The developers love Ruby – and for all the right reasons. Designed to be user-friendly and really easy to use, it’s no wonder that this programming language is often called “a programmer’s best friend.”

What you can expect from Ruby is a shorter, readable code. Unfortunately, that sometimes means lower efficiency compared to other programming languages – but it also means higher productivity.

If you are a beginner in the web development world, Ruby would be a great choice for the first programming language to learn. A well-written Ruby code can be almost as readable as the sentence in plain English language.

But the real reason most people use Ruby is its popular framework — Ruby on Railswhich we mentioned earlier in the text. The great productivity achieved with Rails makes it a common choice for startups who aim for a running start.

Elixir

Elixir appeared back in 2011 and gained popularity almost immediately. It was inspired by Erlang, a language developed back in the ‘80s by Ericsson. Elixir’s author José Valim himself said that he loved Erlang, but also noticed some things that could use a bit of improvement.

Scala

Scala stands for Scalable Language, and is one of the many attempts to “rewrite Java” and it is compiled to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It is safe to say this programming language turned out to be quite a success taking into the consideration that companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, and The Guardian use it in their codebases. Scala is known to be a complex language but also a language worth learning.

5. Protocols

The instructions for how to pass information back and forth between computers and devices are commonly known as protocols.

HTTP

Thanks to this protocol, each website can get to the browser. The protocol requests the website from Google’s server and then receives a response with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the website.

DDP

Uses websockets to create a consistent connection between the client and the server. As a result of that, you get website updates in real-time without having to refresh the browser.

REST

Used mostly for API’s, this protocol has standard methods like GET, POST, and PUT that let information be exchanged between applications.

6. API

An API (application programming interface) allows other developers to use some of the app’s functionality without sharing the code.

The endpoints are exposed by the developers while the API can control access with an API key. Examples of well-made APIs are those created by Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their web services.

7. Data formats

Data is stored in the structure called a data format.

JSON – JavaScript Object Notation is a syntax for storing and exchanging data (just like XML). It is currently becoming the most popular data format out there.

XML – Predominantly used by Microsoft systems, it used to be the most popular data format

CSV – is data formatted by commas; for example Excel data

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8. Client (or Client-side)

Each user of an application is called a client. Clients can be computers, mobile devices, tablets etc. Usually, multiple clients are interacting with the same app stored on a server.

9. Server (or Server-side)

The application code is usually stored on the server. The clients make requests to the servers. The servers then respond to those requests after gathering the requested information.

Ending thoughts on the latest web technologies

In order to stay up to date with the latest web technologies, one has to learn new things all the time. Web technologies are being improved and updated all the time and every web development team should take advantage of that whenever possible.

New web technologies change the entire web development process and it can be hard sometimes to understand all of them in the right way. Luckily, with the right internet technology tutorial, you should be able to learn more about them in no time.