When Twitter began imposing limits on its API for third-party developers in 2010, it sent a strong signal to developers that centralized platforms weren’t to be trusted. That same year, Diaspora — a kind of decentralized Facebook — was founded by four New York students. Later, in 2017, a federated social network named Mastodon experienced … Read more

The decentralized web has been a promising technology for many years now — and I’m not talking about cryptocurrencies. If anything, the hype and financial speculation around cryptocurrencies has distracted from the very real technical progress being made in decentralization. It’s even starting to be baked into web standards, as we shall explore in this … Read more

Those of you old enough to remember the web in the late 1990s will recall the nightmare experiences of coding in CSS (cascading style sheets) during that time, largely because of browser incompatibilities. But we’ve come a long way since then. As CSS pioneer Eric Meyer put it in a recent blog post, the web … Read more

One never knows what to expect in regards to web initiatives from Apple. While the company is a member of the WHATWG group that nowadays steers HTML and other web standards (the other founding members are Google, Mozilla and Microsoft), Apple is famously protective of what it allows on its devices in terms of web … Read more

“Collaborative applications” was one of the new buzzwords to come out of Microsoft Build, the company’s recent annual developer conference. The phrase was bandied about in reference to an application platform for Teams and Office, which gives third-party developers increased access to Microsoft’s core enterprise software products. Developers can both integrate their existing apps into … Read more

After Google I/O earlier this month, I sat down (virtually) with two of Google’s web platform leaders, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith. Our conversation focused on how the web has continued to evolve into a full-fledged platform — even, in some cases, starting to challenge native mobile applications in capability. “The web has become a … Read more

Earlier this month, Google announced it was updating the way Google Docs renders documents — from the traditional HTML DOM-based approach (Document Object Model) to using a web standard called Canvas. The <canvas> element is typically used to draw graphics on a webpage, via JavaScript. So in a sense, what Google Docs will be doing … Read more

What does it mean to be a developer in 2021? If you use a no-code tool and build an app entirely by drag and drop, does that make you a developer? What if you “remix” (i.e. copy) an existing web app on Glitch and change a few bits of code in it — does that … Read more

I first came across the application programming interface (API) directory, ProgrammableWeb, in September 2005, shortly after it was launched by John Musser. At the time, the directory had just 54 listings. How times have changed, because nearly 16 years later ProgrammableWeb lists over 24,000 APIs. It’s an indication of how pervasive APIs have become on … Read more

Jamstack is a modern web development concept invented by Netlify, a company that offers CI/CD and deployment services for the web. Typically, a Jamstack approach calls for pre-rendering as much of a website’s content as possible and delivering it via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Dynamic functionality can be added to the mix via the … Read more

GraphQL, a query language for APIs and a server-side runtime for executing those queries, has become one of the most popular ways for web applications to fetch data. It’s increasingly a go-to solution for Single-Page Applications (SPAs), serverless offerings, Jamstack frameworks, and other modern applications. Most importantly, it’s become the technology of choice for building … Read more

Web development in 2021 is so dominated by JavaScript and its many frontend frameworks, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the traditional server-side web application architecture is not only alive and well — but thriving. 55.3% of Django developers who took the annual StackOverflow survey said they will continue to use it; and 49.3% said … Read more

Earlier this month, Google announced Flutter 2, the latest version of its UI toolkit for building “natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.” Flutter allows developers to create native apps for five operating systems — iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux — as well as a web app for modern … Read more

Instagram Lite, a version of the Instagram app that weighs only 2MB — compared to 30MB for the full iOS and Android apps — was relaunched on Android earlier this month. Curiously, Instagram decided to ditch the previous Progressive Web App (PWA) version of Instagram Lite and re-build it as an Android app using an … Read more

Just over a year ago, Microsoft debuted a new web browser that was designed to replace its long-running — and often controversial — Internet Explorer product. Called Microsoft Edge, the new browser is notable for being based on Google’s open source browser engine Chromium. But despite abandoning most of its proprietary browser software, Microsoft is … Read more