Here we will summarize the main trends in web development for 2018, both from the point of view of technologies and main frameworks.

Online Customer Services

2016 was the year in which chatbots began to be used across multiple web applications. In 2017 chatbots became useful and important to customers, contributing true value to our website. Therefore, using chatbots will be a priority when developing an application during this year which has just begun.

As we said, chatbots have become an essential part of our website (whether for a product sales website or a development company website), since they offer support to customers at any time, giving the feeling that a real person is always attending on the other side. These chatbots are smart enough to guide the client through the websites or to directly suggest a product according to certain requirements.

In 2018, it is expected that customers will have preference for websites supported with a chatbot and, moreover, it is also foreseen a growth in this trend, so that by 2020, 85% of websites will use this service.

Progressive web applications

This concept came out a couple of years ago and later in 2016 we started to get familiar with this technology. This year, progressive web application will be a great competitor for native applications on mobile devices.

The progressive web applications (PWA) are websites that are similar to a native application because, thanks to the service workers, they can even work offline, providing a very pleasant user experience.

A user can save a direct access to the web on the desktop device and the web, provided by service workers, can still work in the background and cache, so that when a user enters the web page, the web loads faster.

The visits in our clients’ websites have multiplied and the time spent on the website has increased of almost 70% thanks to this type of web applications.

If it is true that iOS devices still do not guarantee many advantages since service workers are not supported, it is also true that in 2018 things could change and improve in these devices.

Flash is disappearing

Flash has a big defect and that’s the fact that it does not work on mobile devices. Most sites have already migrated to HTML5 which offers all the tools that Flash used to offer as online players.

It is recommended that, any website that has not migrated yet, should do it as soon as possible, because in 2018 it is expected that the number of websites with flash will reduce consistently.

Frameworks

Next, we will name the main frameworks for web development and their innovation expected for 2018.

• Angular. This framework is one of the most commonly used in web development, together with Typescript. If in April 2017 we met Angular 4 for the first time, recently it was time to see the new version 5 of this powerful framework, which will be the favourite one during 2018.
• ReactJs. Although it is not considered a framework but rather a UI library, we will include it in our list as it represents a widely used technology in the current development. It offers great rendering performance and it could be Angular’s main competitor in 2018.
• Vue.js. It was born in 2016 as a “mix” of angular and React, being less complete than angular, but more than React in some aspects. Although it has less “fame”, that’s another framework to be highlighted in this 2018.
• Laravel. PHP is still a very popular language for developing websites and has improved considerably with the publication of version 7.x. Laravel is the most popular open source PHP framework, and with its recent version 5.x, it will be a great competitor for many frameworks from now on.