Author: Jeremy Morgan
Developers have a natural thirst to learn new things. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re professional learners. But if you’re like me, it can be overwhelming to parse through which exciting new tech to play around with—let alone find the time to do so.
With that in mind, here are five new technologies that have me excited, along with a Pluralsight course that can serve as a foundational “starter” to get you thinking about how to use the technology.
1. Flutter
Flutter is an open-source SDK (software development kit) for creating cross platform applications. Flutter has been around a while, but recently made huge strides with the SDK. You can now develop applications for iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac or Linux desktops all from the same codebase. It’s created by Google and has a massive community behind it.
Why it matters: Building the same application across multiple platforms is difficult. Once you’ve developed and tested your Android application, you have to repeat most of that effort to build a separate application for an iPhone. Flutter saves you time and effort by using a single code base to publish to both—and even the desktop.
Pluralsight has a learning path for Flutter to get you started quickly. These courses will help you with debugging, testing and publishing packages in Flutter all the way to sharing your app ideas with the world.
2. Vite
Vite is a new set of frontend tooling that could flip JavaScript development on its head. Rather than relying on large package bundling (Webpack, rollup, etc.), it takes advantage of native ES modules in the browser. Vite pre-bundles dependencies into native JavasScript modules. This allows the browser to handle modules as they’re being requested, which enables faster builds and blazing performance for application delivery as well.
Why it matters: Today’s JavaScript projects can grow enormous with thousands of modules that must be retrieved and processed. While tools like Webpack do a great job bundling, we’re getting close to outgrowing this model.
Since Vite leverages JavaScript at a deep level, our JavaScript Core Language path can set you up with the foundational knowledge to dig into Vite and build high performance applications quickly.
3. Web Assembly
WebAssembly (WASM) is a binary instruction format for a JavaScript virtual machine. WebAssembly runs at near native speeds, enabling high performance within your browser. (Think of things like games, video and other high performance tasks that have been traditionally too slow for JavaScript to process.) It’s not a replacement for JavaScript, but rather a high performance execution environment that works alongside it.
Why it matters: Traditionally if you want high performance for your application you need to write something “native” rather than something that runs in the browser. With WebAssembly you can take advantage of hardware in ways you’ve never been able to before. Plus, you write in a more familiar language that compiles to WebAssembly. Languages like C++, C# and Rust can be compiled to WebAssembly. You can write out software in a language you’re comfortable with and bring incredible performance to web applications.
Pluralsight’s Building Web Applications with Blazor path will get you started with using Blazor to turn C# code into WebAssembly, in order to leverage high performance applications from within a browser.
4. Blockchain
Blockchain is a way of recording data into a “digital ledger.” Each transaction is stored and distributed, making the record difficult or impossible to hack or destroy. While commonly associated with cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, developers are leveraging blockchain in new ways.
Why it matters: Developers are always looking for new ways to secure data, especially in the shadow of high-profile cyber attacks. Distributed ledgers can be the answer to a single point-of-failure problem. The ability to store data that can’t be tampered with easily or disappear overnight is lucrative to companies of all industries, and we’re in the early stages of development. Financial companies, supply chain management and many other industries are looking towards blockchain as a solution for secure data storage.
You can learn about the fundamentals of Blockchain or go in depth with courses like Deploying Hyperledger Fabric with AWS Blockchain Templates with Pluralsight.
5. Serverless databases
Scaling is everything. Today’s applications aren’t hindered by a single metal box in a data center, and databases shouldn’t be either. Serverless GraphQL capable database services have been popping up everywhere, and they’re a great solution for that small project that could grow huge. Services like FaunaDB, Firebase, Aurora, Cosmos DB and many more are providing scalable database services you can wire your app into without worrying about things like setup, maintenance or growth.
Why it matters: When you’re developing a data-based application, you don’t want to worry about setting up a database system. You don’t want to worry about things like installation, optimization or security concerns. These services allow you to focus on the data itself, rather than the system behind it. Cloud native databases also take care of scaling, so you can grow the database with your application, and the pay-as-you-go model means you also won’t be spending money on a database system that’s bigger than what you need.
Pluralsight offers courses on Building data storage solutions on Azure, Firebase functions or Amazon Aurora, among many others.