Dev in Dev: Issue 1 Nov 2021

About D.I.D.

The Developments in (Web) Development series is about pulling together interesting updates and developments that come across my radar in web development. This can include product releases, updates conference talks and events.

Transitional Apps?

AJAX and Single Page Apps ushered in a new age of web experiences, however it is not without it's flaws. Transitional Apps is a new paradigm of web apps that proposes a new direction. Rich Harris of Svelte introduces this concept at Jam Stack Conf 2021.

Transitions on the Web

Transitional apps isn't the only effort to improve navigational experiences in web apps. The shared element transition API is a proposal to bring native transitions to the web platform. Some of the goals of this overlap with an earlier proposal called the Portals API. You can try out shared element transitions and give feedback at their github repo.

You can demo this here

Powerful Performance Tooling

One really interesting announcement of Chrome Dev Summit 2021 is the lighthouse user flows. This allows you to audit and profile the performance of an application throughout various user interactions.

Cutting Edge Computing

NextJS recently announced version 12 and with it came a several features and services. One of which is Vercel's edge functions which is basically cloud functions that run on the edge (CDNs). This concept isn't entirely new as Cloud Flare Workers and Deno Deploy have a similar goals. This signifies yet another shift in how we think about building and deploying web apps.

Next level serverless

Serverless Cloud is a recently launched platform that lets build, test and deploy to cloud seamlessly right into your cloud editor!

Conclusion

That brings us to the end of the first issue of D.I.D. What is your favourite update? Do you have one you'd like to share? Please let me know in the comments!

Need More?

I'll be giving a talk at DevFest Caribbean 2021 today at 4:30 pm (-400 GMT) that goes deeper into this stuff. You are welcomed to check it out as well as the other amazing talks at the event.