2023 Development Trends

Five development trends we’re watching out for this year.

Our tech-savvy Web Developer, Lewis tells us about what he is keeping his eyes peeled for in the world of technology and development in 2023.

WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a format that allows binary code to be run via a web browser, this could mean web applications will one day be able to achieve a native-like performance. The real-world implications of this could be that heavier applications, such as Photoshop, will eventually get a web-based version in the same way that word processing did with Google Docs/Office 365.

AI

This one is quite topical, as recent projects such as ChatGPT and DALL-E-2 are getting a lot of attention. With Google and Microsoft investing in using these powerful AI tools to power search their engines, this is something that we will likely be hearing about for some time. AI and machine learning has been around for a long time, but only in the last year or so have we seen such clear examples of the potential that this technology has to offer. Out of all the emerging technologies, this is the one that could potentially have the largest impact on society as a whole. It will be particularly interesting to see how this field develops and how lawmakers attempt to alleviate the potential pitfalls.

Serverless architecture

With cloud computing becoming more ubiquitous and web development slowly moving away from more traditional PHP-based development, serverless architectures are being utilised more than ever before. Essentially serverless architectures mean that instead of paying for a server that is always running regardless of whether it’s needed, services such as AWS Lambda and Fargate allow for new infrastructure to be created at the point of use, meaning you only pay for what you use.

Low code

Essentially, this allows team members with less development experience to be able to build more advanced web pages than ever before. Low-code site builders, such as Wix, have been around for a long time. However, we have seen more powerful CMS’, such as Drupal and WordPress, adopt low-code techniques. This allows developers to take advantage of the flexibility offered by these frameworks whilst making the content editing experience more user-friendly.

Automated testing

Automated testing is the process of using software tools to run tests on an application automatically, rather than relying on manual testing. It involves creating scripts or test cases that can be run repeatedly, allowing developers to quickly and efficiently check for bugs or issues as they make changes to the code. There are also other forms of automated testing, such as regression testing, which take a screenshot of an application and visually compare the differences between the current version and the last screenshot it took. This can be useful as it helps to spot unintentional changes to the front end of the application.