How Modern Technologies Change The Web Development
Web development is rapidly changing. Although web technologies were registering rapid adjustments, they were available only to companies with big development budgets. Finally, modern web development has become available to any business. Let's see how it happened.
Web developers joke that whenever they learn new technology, a new one comes to play. Most of these changes were happening on the frontend side which is responsible for the look and feel of the websites and web applications.
The business logic of the web pages was remaining steady.
The web is dominated by WordPress. WordPress architecture comes to form in the early 2000s, and it hasn't changed a lot since then.
With WordPress, the presentation and the business logic are coupled and cannot be separated. Moreover, additional functionality must come in the form of plugins, and part of the plugins are written in PHP.
I will be opinionated here and will tell that PHP shows its age and it is still widely used because of WordPress's popularity.
The other websites that weren't created with WordPress were free in the choice of the business logic technology selections.
I want to tell you here that the visible part of websites is almost always written with the Javascript programming language.
We are talking about the business logic now.
Before modern web development broke through, if a business wasn't using WordPress or other CMSes, they were using their own technology for the business logic and for keeping the data.
Let's assume we have an old-style business logic for our website
The custom business logic is providing data to be presented on the web pages together with 4 main operations: Create, Replace, Update, Delete. This is abbreviated as CRUD.
and other operations depending on the use cases of the website.
So many websites were using the Create, Replace, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations that many developers were getting extremely boring because almost everything they do every day was creating CRUD business logic over and over again.
Headless CMS
A few years ago, a tectonic change happened in the web development industry. In my humble opinion, the best practices that were being used in the internet giants' and big companies' businesses can now be utilized by small companies.
Let's see how one of the early suppliers of the technology Contentful defines the concept.
A headless CMS is any type of back-end content management system where the content repository “body” is separated or decoupled from the presentation layer "head".
Finally, people came up with the solution to replace the daunting tasks of creating CRUD business logic over and over again. On the other side, business owners can save dozens of thousands of dollars by not hiring software engineers to reinvent the wheel.
The headless CMSs become so better over time that you can define any kind of data organization with your CMS. Change it faster, many times without even the help of the technical people.
But perhaps, the greatest point is that it is not something that only software engineers can see and understand. The User-friendly interface (UI) is available to the whole team. Everybody who has access to the user interface can see how the data is organized!
Remember about the modern web development architecture when an architect from old days comes and says you need a team to create a business logic in some X language.
JAMStack
Ok, the industry solved the problem of CRUD application. Now, what about the business logic that is not CRUD. For example, how to handle payments, manage shopping carts, bookings, etc.
That is partially covered with JAMstack. JAMstack got its name because it stacks three technologies: Javascript (For making websites dynamic), API-s (abbreviated from Application Programming interface for business logic), and Markup (for presenting websites).
The API component consists of two parts:
- Headless CMSs
- Various business logic provided by companies
We talked about headless CMS-s. Now let's talk about services.
As the presentation of the website got successfully separated from the business logic many companies started to provide services for different actions that would be needed by websites and web applications.
As the JAMstack becomes more widespread the variety of the services grows.
Almost common functionalities that are not CRUD are now implemented by several services.
In many cases, you might be happy with Jamstack service.
Of course, you can always change it with in-house implementation if you want to.
Blogs in modern web development
Perhaps, blogs are the best candidate to be moved to the modern web development world. Blogs breathe on organic traffic from search engines and search engines and users love fast blazingly fast loading websites.
Another big traffic source for blog articles is social media. Do you know that Facebook will show a post with a slow loading target URL to fewer people than the post with a fast loading page? Some people say that this is true for Facebook ads as well. The loading speed and the quality of the page can be considered by other social media platforms.
If you use the modern blogging platform you'll not have to worry about the speed, extensibility, SEO, and user-friendliness of your website. You can give it a try today.
Conclusion
In this short article, we scratched the surface of what is modern web development and how you can use it in your online business. Hopefully, this guide will at least give data points while deciding on the architecture of your web-based business.
