Decentralized Chat: Matrix Offers Red Pill to Slack Users

One of the most interesting internet trends of 2021 is the experimentation going on with decentralized technologies. We’re seeing a blossoming of open source, decentralized internet applications — many of them attempting to provide alternatives to big tech products. Privacy breaches, misinformation, black box algorithms, lack of user control — these are just some of … Read more

Aether: A Decentralized Reddit with Self-Moderation and Privacy

Aether is one of many new applications in the decentralized social media ecosystem. It’s like a peer-to-peer version of Reddit, with similar news aggregation and community discussion features. Interestingly, Aether is not only decentralizing the technical aspects of its product, but the user governance too. In other words, the users of Aether get to govern … Read more

DID You Hear? Decentralized Identifiers Are Coming

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

Microsoft’s Collaborative Apps – the Web Is the Engine

“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

Google Talks Web Platform, OS Integration, WebGPU and 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

2021 State of APIs: Ubiquitous, Diverse, Occasionally Open

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

Slow Jamstack Builds: Netlify’s Solution Is Distributed Persistent Rendering

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

Why Shopify Favors GraphQL over REST for Its APIs

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

Django’s Place in a Web Development World Ruled by React

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

Google’s Flutter Beefs up Web Support, So How Does It Compare to React Native Now?

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