A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

Cetera Financial Group

Enterprise Technologies

Given the emerging trend of today’s technologies, several areas are undergoing an enormous transformation. Whether it is meant for mitigating the typical issues that enterprises experience regarding rapid deployments, changing styles for Web applications, making assets mobile friendly, or reducing the pressure on existing limited resources, emerging technology is playing a key role.
Some of the Web Application Trends for 2017 are as follows:

Artificial Intelligence

Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are releasing their versions of the AI technologies to be used by the public, to implement a variety of features. Whether it is improving the quality of the search engines or identifying a pattern or inaccuracy, the AI technology is helping us immensely. Using machine learning, it is now possible to dynamically create aesthetic sites based on specific user inputs and pre-programmed algorithms. It starts with an AI assistant that asks you a series of questions that help it determine the nature of your business and the type of website you are trying to create. Then, based on hundreds of hours of programmed algorithms, it helps determine a right combination of branding, layout, design, and content that help your website shine.

Internet of Things

With increased machine-to-machine communication, a complete network of data-gathering sensors are helping enterprises collect critical information to form an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. A web-based user interface for an IoT application needs to be clean, intuitive, and fast. The real value of the Internet of things technology will be at the interstices of collecting all the data points and interpreting it in the right context. This will become critical for advanced analytics based on the data collected.

Virtual Reality

While a bulk of the frontline applications of Virtual Reality has been around the gaming industry, the advances made by companies like Google and Mozilla will extend the applications of the Virtual Reality in the web world. Especially in areas like Real estate tours, media coverages, and relevant and contextual information in a virtual reality format.

Containers

Containers enable developers to manage software code, particularly software developed for cloud apps. Companies like Docker have containers that can wrap a piece of software in a complete file system like code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and any configuration artifacts. Web developers will increasingly use containers as a way to run an application and its dependencies in resource-isolated processes.

It helps in efficiently packaging an application's code, configurations, and dependencies into easy-to-use building blocks that deliver environmental consistency, operational efficiency, developer productivity, and version control.

Preprocessors

With increased pressure on enterprise developers to produce more with current limited resources as well as ensuring that the code is readable and maintainable, it has become important to use a Preprocessing language. A preprocessor essentially takes an arbitrary source file and converts it into something that the browser understands. Such a utility makes code easier to read, programs easier to be developed and more portable. Preprocessors like CoffeeScript, Typescript, and Groovy are becoming commonplace and will help developers immensely in the coming year. If Javascript is the intended output, they either compile from an entirely different language or convert a superset or new language standard down to today's standard. Scripting languages like Python or JavaScript were once limited to little projects, but now they’re the foundation for serious work.

Package Managers

With a view to automate installation and configuration of the project dependencies, there is a need to have sophisticated packaging utilities that will help any issues caused by incomplete dependencies. It does mean that the focus of the build script now moves to the developer, which means the skill sets expected from the developers are becoming increasingly complex. Package managers automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner. With npm, pacman, Bower and Duo Playing a significant role in web application packaging, developers will trend towards using its features more and in a variety of automation tasks.

Website and WebApp Generators

In order to reuse code templates and proven standardized development processes, enterprises will start looking increasingly towards using scaffolding tools. With a modular architecture that can scale out of the box, these frameworks leverage the success and lessons learned from several open-source communities to ensure the stack developers use is as intelligent as possible. In the case of Yeoman, the Yo tool scaffolds out a new application, writing build configuration (like Gulpfile), and pulling in relevant build tasks, and package manager dependencies (like npm) that developers might need for your build.

Web UX Design

Making websites look unique could be one of the many trends in the near future. The flat design pattern that has engulfed the web design paradigm has led to a lot of sites looking similar. Thus, leading to a wide perception that the web seems to have lost its personality and creativity. Material design and Angular JS are great moves in this direction. Using features like services, layout, and directives, most of the material features can be designed. The material design gives more depth to a flat design by incorporating light and shadows, while featuring grid-based layouts and responsive animations.

Motion User Interface

With a huge demand for custom animations for web design element, Motion UI has become popular. A big focus of the library is using transitions to show a change in state, for example, sliding in and out a sidebar on click. This creates more engagement from the client and helps responsiveness.

Browser Computer Vision

There have been some impressive strides made in the browser side Computer Vision through client side libraries. Using these features, developers will be able to experience real-time color tracking, face detection, and camera-based features.

UX Bots

Web developers will be increasingly working with ChatBots, that will help answer basic questions from customers as well as automate tasks based on specific situations that have been decided in pre-decided algorithms.

Cetera Financial Group is a leading network of independent retail broker-dealers empowering the delivery of objective financial advice.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.