Today a group of open social networking advocates has launched the Social Web Foundation (SWF), “a non-profit organization dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.” I chatted with one of the three co-founders, Evan Prodromou, about the new organization and what its goals are. The other two founding members … Read more

“One thing that is clear to me is that React Server Components will destroy React,” said Igor Minar, one of the creators of the Angular framework and now senior director of engineering at Cloudflare. Others, notably frontend cloud company Vercel, think that React Server Components “augment the fundamentals of React.” So who’s right? To quickly … Read more

The rebelling against JavaScript frameworks continues. In the latest Lex Fridman interview, AI app developer Pieter Levels explained that he builds all his apps with vanilla HTML, PHP, a bit of JavaScript via jQuery, and SQLite. No fancy JavaScript frameworks, no modern programming languages, no Wasm. “I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. … Read more

Patrik Backman knows a thing or two about open source software and the impact of the LAMP stack on the early web. He was a co-founder of MariaDB and before that the director of software engineering at MySQL, the original “M” in the LAMP stack — although many argue that MariaDB is the “M” these … Read more

React and its virtual DOM paradigm has been at the forefront of frontend development for a decade now, but there’s been a swing towards simplicity and web-native features in more recent frameworks. Astro is a great example; and it also now has the support of Netlify, a leading player in the current web landscape. Last … Read more

Ten years ago, Facebook developer Christopher Chedeau gave a presentation at Oscon (O’Reilly Open Source Convention) about a relatively new JavaScript framework called React. As The New Stack’s Chris Dawson noted at the time, the presentation was fascinating because it explained the concepts behind React — and not just how it worked, but why it … Read more

Four years ago, I wrote about how NoSQL databases were growing fast — in large part due to their compatibility with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). But that was before the generative AI boom that began with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022. So what has happened to NoSQL databases since ChatGPT … Read more

The phrase “agentic systems” (or “agentic workflows”) popped up more than a few times at last week’s AI Engineer World’s Fair, held in San Francisco. AI agents were the focus of two leading AI engineering startups: LangChain and LlamaIndex, each of which offered their own spin on the technology in presentations. The term “agent” in … Read more

To develop the user interface of its web browser, Edge, Microsoft recently began moving away from React and other JavaScript frameworks to embrace what it called an “HTML-first” approach. Instead of using React to create the user interface — the most common web development paradigm today — the Microsoft Edge team pivoted to an approach … Read more

Glitch, the platform that allows developers to build “full-stack web apps in your browser,” announced today that it is adding more “open web” features to Glitch, to encourage more discovery and curation on the platform. I spoke to Glitch’s CEO Anil Dash to find out more. Dash is also VP of developer experience at Fastly, … Read more

Twenty years ago, browser-based applications — web apps — made a giant leap in functionality. In April 2004, Google launched one of the first web apps that worked just like a native app: Gmail. The technology behind it, a JavaScript technique that would later be termed “Ajax” (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), allowed web apps to … Read more

With frontend development, is it better to start simple and build on top of standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript? Or do you need a swiss army knife framework, like Next.js or Angular, with built-in functionality like server-side rendering (SSR), routing and navigation, and more complex forms of state management? Of course, it depends on what … Read more

As expected, this year’s Google I/O developer conference was heavily focused on AI (Google A/I?). In a pre-briefing, Google told reporters that it aims to make “AI accessible for every developer.” Ergo, a raft of new or updated AI APIs and models were announced. However, deep questions remain about how all this AI pixie dust … Read more

Last week the static site generator Eleventy (11ty) held a one-day virtual conference for its passionate community of web developers. In his opening keynote, Eleventy creator Zach Leatherman urged attendees to “keep building for the web.” He likened this to an act of rebellion against the dark forces driving today’s internet. “We have nothing but … Read more

It’s a measure of how complex the API ecosystem has become that companies like Stainless, an SDK generator for APIs, even exist. Founder Alex Rattray previously worked on the developer platform team at Stripe, and I spoke to him recently about why code generation (codegen) is critical for today’s APIs, the work Stainless has done … Read more