October 20188 IN MY V EWSince the advent of the internet, the web development scene has been evolving at a rapid pace. We have seen different phases of evolution in web development and design, from static sites built on top of pure HTML to modern day Progressive Web Apps (PWA).The web has been adapting rapidly to the innovations in technology. In the early 80's and 90's, it was about putting text and images on the internet. The ability to link documents, images, videos and etc. Using Hyperlinks are seen as a big advantage compared to purely text-based documents.Server-Side ProgrammingTowards the beginning of the century, Dynamic HTML or DHTML started catching up. This was the time when the server-side programming model became quite popular. Many technologies like Active Server Pages (ASP) and JavaServer Pages (JSP) gained prominence during this period. These technologies helped to ease a developer's life by making the development of dynamic websites fairly simple compared to earlier options like Common Gateway Interface (CGI). The developers were abstracted from writing low-level code, which required them to handle server level details like request and response. Many of the popular web programming languages and frameworks were born out of this like Microsoft's ASP.Net, PHP, JSP etc. to name a few.Web ServicesAs the popularity of the server-side programming languages increased, people also started to realize their limitation. One such limitation was the markup for rendering visual elements and the business logic was intermingled together. It was important to keep the visual representation separate from the business logic. That led to the advent of Web Services which encapsulated the business logic and allowed for interoperability based on new standards. Web services were largely responsible for the advent of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Web services were also complemented by the rise of XML as a preferred standard format for exchanging information between applications.Client-Side ProgrammingServer-side programming was good to offload complex logic to a remote server. With the technical advances in computing power, for last 10-15 years, we have seen that the normal laptops and desktop computers gain more firepower in terms of processor and RAM. Even the modern-day smartphones are quite powerful. This has led to the emergence of client-side technologies starting with JavaScript. JavaScript is very popular because it is supported by all the browsers. The emergence of JavaScript led to the increase in popularity of client-side frameworks like jQuery and Knockout. Web developers started leveraging client-side programming model and using techniques like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to do partial updates to the web pages. Web developers realized quickly that doing PostBacks and full-page refresh was not the best way to have an optimal user experience. Hence REST and with it the Single Page Applications (SPA) were born. Those days are long gone when we would select a country and then wait for the complete page to be posted back to the server. Based on the selected country the dependent drop down for state or regions within that country would be rendered using server-side processing logic. Today, web developers have the capabilities to tap into advanced features like geolocation which can help to build personalized experience for end users. We don't have to ask the customers to select their location. Businesses can directly take customers to the localized versions of their sites based on customer location. REST and SPAThrough the extensive use of XML, the web development community had agreed that its payload can be quite THE EVOLUTION OF Web Development anD DesignBY NILESH GULE, DATA ARCHITECT AT A MAJOR INSURANCE COMPANY
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