The IT industry undergoes a huge transformation every year. There are changes to the current methods and many new solutions. Fortunately, the times of the pandemic have not adversely affected the functioning of the IT market. What’s more, they have started a transformation whose development we will also see this year. What #mobile, #frontend, and #backend trends will dominate the upcoming months and how will they affect the entire industry? We posed this question to our top experts – you can find their answers in the text below.
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Mobile trends for 2022
These days, there are a couple of trends for native mobile developers. However, there is one trend that is evident for both Android and iOS: the way of building user interfaces moves in the direction of declarative and reactive styles of programming. Google and Apple released two new tools for this very purpose: Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI.
Android
A major announcement was made for Android Developers in the summer of 2021. Namely, the Jetpack Compose has become stable. That is a completely new way of creating views on Android. Developers may finally resign from XMLs and replace imperative with a declarative way of thinking. Jetpack Compose is written around Kotlin and it has considerable support from Google, even if it still has some limitations when creating really advanced views. The change, however, has imposed a lot of conveniences: for the new navigation, saving state, and themes to name a few. Additionally, there are many tutorials and articles with Jetpack Compose, so it is already worth checking out.
You can find out more about Android trends and insights from our Lead Android Engineer Maciej Kozłowski here.
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iOS trends to keep an eye on in 2022
There were two major announcements at the WWDC 2019: SwiftUI and Combine. SwiftUI lets developers create UIs in an easy and declarative way while, at the same time, being able to immediately see changes to the UI without having to rebuild or relaunch the app. Combine does the same for the business logic allowing a more declarative and reactive style programming. Even though most developers were excited about them right away, it was difficult to use them in a production application because it meant dropping support for older versions of iOS and only supporting iOS 13+.
The release of iOS 15 last year will allow teams to use these new frameworks in their production applications, and we will see fewer and fewer apps that rely solely on UIKit and imperative programming. Similar to what happened after the Swift release, we may expect that some new features will only be available if you adopt these new frameworks in the future. Apple already did this with iOS 14 widgets being exclusive to SwiftUI.
Cross-platform frameworks
In the hybrid mobile framework world, there are only two strong players: React Native and Flutter. When developing applications in JavaScript, React Native still will be the only reasonable option, leaving other alternatives like Ionic or Cordova which rely on Webview far behind. However, the second option – Flutter – is becoming a really strong alternative for hybrid applications. Google gives a lot of support to Flutter and Dart. Some examples of such support include null safety, stable web support, or upcoming support for desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The next topic really worth taking note of are the Progressive Web Application techniques. For some time now, Google Play Store has been accepting PWA to be uploaded to the store. We expect further improvements to PWA techniques which will increase its popularity among developers.
Backend trends
In the backend world, we can also notice changes in the development and the infrastructure areas. We anticipate that the following trends will dominate among backend developers in 2022:
Web 3.0
In recent months, interest in cryptocurrencies, DeFis and NFTs has skyrocketed. It wasn’t just the increased price of Bitcoin that drove this phenomenon but also the additional features that various blockchains offer – decentralization, authenticity, and transparency of Smart Contracts. In recent years, blockchain technology has gained traction in several industries, including banking, supply chain management, public governance, and document lifecycle management. NFTs don’t have to be just images that you buy with cryptocurrencies but can also be applied more generally as a public certificate of authenticity and evolve into an entire ecosystem. Owners are also able to transfer the assets’ ownership to other users. Each time such a transaction is made, the creator is able to gain an extra premium.
If you are a Node.js developer and want to start building blockchain-oriented applications using smart contracts on Ethereum, check the following packages:
- truffle – to build and test smart contracts on your local environment
- web3 – to integrate your Node.js application with Ethereum blockchain
Cloud-Native
With the growing popularity of leasing computation services commonly known as Cloud Computing, you are able to leverage the time spent on infrastructure configuration towards the development and feature improvement. If you choose Cloud Service, you will find dozens of options for connecting your software components. Recently the Docker Containers have revolutionized the way we deploy software by just wrapping up the running process into standard, pluggable form – like the unified cargo load unit.
Containers are ephemeral by nature – that means they lose all their internal state on close. Such an approach is easier to manage the lifecycle of instances of your microservice applications by monitoring the state, auto restarts, and applying recovery policies. As a result, you can build scalable, fault-tolerant, and robust applications. Technologies like Kubernetes and Docker are widely adopted by the Cloud providers and you are able to pick up the managed service of your needs. There are also vendor-oriented possibilities (like Fargate on AWS) that can help you leverage the cost of your infrastructure.
Serverless computing
In exchange to maintaining an up and running application, more projects’ parts can be transferred into an on-demand lifecycle often limited to single function execution. As a result of this approach, you will be able to easily leverage traffic peaks in your application – another instance would be established by the Cloud Provider. In such a case, you will only pay for already consumed resources so just for function executions.
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The great advantage of Serverless is the environment setup delegation to the Cloud Provider. You don’t have to worry about keeping the latest version of your environment or applying patches. That leaves more time for application development. FaaS (Functions as a Service) include dozens of applications. Starting from stream and batch processing, APIs, data transformation, and integration with other Cloud Services – like Machine Learning or Big Data. They can be used as an additional track for your services and be triggered through various ways: simple REST calls, Business Events on Message Broker, Cloud Monitoring, Data modification, etc. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions are widely adopted in various existing projects and this trend would only continue.
What front end trends should we except in 2022?
Frontend development is evolving very fast. Almost every day a new framework or library appears. Some of them gain more popularity over time. A few of them may eventually become industry standard, but most will quickly fade into obscurity. Some solutions, however, have been stable for years and are still the best option for developers. Let’s go through different frontend development areas and try to point out the best tools and frameworks to use in 2022.
Single Page Application Frameworks
We are predicting that the situation with Single Page application frameworks will be stable. There are still 3 key players in the market React, Angular, and Vue. React’s strong position as a leader is rather not threatened thanks to its common updates and a large ecosystem of ready-to-use components and hooks. Most job offers for frontend devs will for sure still be touching React. Angular will probably continue to slowly lose popularity.
Styling
CSS in Js solution will rise in popularity. Writing styles in JavaScript started to be a standard for SPA applications leaving far behind all preprocessor solutions like Sass or Less. Styled-Components is still a leader but has a lot of competitors like brand new Stylex from Facebook. For non-SPA projects, like standard CMS-based websites with content generated server-side, preprocessors will still be widely used. Mature Sass preprocessor will continue to be the best choice for such projects.
Testing
We described the best testing frameworks to use in 2022 in another article on our blog here.
Other front end trends
- Typescript – will continue to be industry standard for strong typing in most of the new javascript-related projects.
- Micro Frontends – microfrontends architecture for large projects will be rising in popularity, making them more scalable and manageable. GraphQL – The percent of projects done with GraphQL will increase, as back-end developers slowly adopt this idea instead of the standard REST approach. It will make frontend
- GraphQL clients like Apollo or Relay used in a larger number of projects. Probably some new GraphQL clients will appear on a market
- Global State Management – Redux usage will decrease thanks to other simpler solutions for global state management like React Context API, XState, Recoil, and others. For Redux-based projects, the newest Redux Toolkit will be more often chosen than other middlewares.
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What is the most important thing to keep in mind after reading this article? Here’s a summary:
Mobile applications
In this case, the most prominent trend is the declarative and reactive style of interface programming. For Android applications, we recommend using XML and Jetpack Compose. After last year’s iOS 15 release, we can expect SwiftUI to be the best tool for creating interfaces in terms of this operating system.
Backend
After the last surge of interest in cryptocurrencies and the possibilities that blockchain offers, this technology is likely to become especially popular in 2022. In addition, it is worth focusing on the use of Cloud Computing and Serverless computing to improve work.
Front-end:
Among the single-page applications frameworks, React will invariably be the leader, while Angular will lose on popularity. In the context of styling, we can still see the leading (but threatened) styling components position for SPA projects. In other cases, we can still rely on the preprocessors. Among mobile applications in JavaScript we can indicate the strong position of only 2 players: React Native and Flutter. Moreover, we expect that the popularity of Progressive Web Apps will increase in 2022.
