Yes! I looked at Deno and played with Fresh and Aleph.js (the later was more to my liking) over Christmas break, and indeed this is heading towards the same direction.
Deno is also a Node.js-free environment based on V8, and that’s another trend - for Next.js you can also deploy it over pure V8. You still need Node.js to build it, but can decide on page-by-page basis which runtime (Node.js or V8) the whole thing runs on the server. And, according to my tests, V8 is significantly faster too.
Another interesting thing I read about Deno is it can build your project as snapshot so startup time is really fast.
They are calls v8 snapshot and it’s a feature of V8 itself. Can’t remember actually did I read about it or did I listen to a Deno developer interview. I didn’t dig deep but found this https://deno.land/x/deno@v0.2.9/Releases.md?code=&source=#v010--20180823--rust-rewrite-and-v8-snapshot from 2018. Could it be that they currently only use snapshot for TypeScript and libdeno compilation?
This is interesting and very exciting indeed. The next step I guess would be to provide a snapshot with JIT already pre-trained somehow so that there’s no “warmup” although I believe V8 is doing an excellent job here already.
That circles back to OP’s questions, I feel.
A common classification these days is that something is either:
There’s a spectrum here but it’s not a wide one. You usually can categorize the technology in question to either of the above fairly easily.
So far I’ve seen that the new “JavaScript Frameworks” are not shipping with a DB access layer, instead there may or may not be data-fetching layer, as in making API requests to the backend. This is probably a good thing too, as I’d prefer my data to be handled by something other than JavaScript, up until the moment when it’s in the need of being displayed to the end user. This still leaves the space for reliable and robust backends to be written in, let’s say, Elixir + Phoenix + Ecto.
Something completely different.
What are your predictions about how people will interface with the web in the future. Five years from now. Ten years from now. And beyond.
As mentioned before, browsers are still hugely popular. I catch myself using Word Online over the desktop version all the time. And as a teacher me and my colleagues also use online tools very often. Desktop apps less than before. PowerPoint is getting used less, in favor of web apps.
On the other hand, some large companies are investing astronomical amounts of money into VR/AR. What does that potentially mean for the web and the browser as a medium?
And Siri, Alexa, and their friends, are getting smarter. I don’t like using them… yet. Have my doubts I will in the future, but who knows.
Don’t have kids that age, but wonder if younger generations find it natural to “converse” with them. Or at least, give them orders. Instead of whipping out their phones… if they have one.