The New Stack

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

In a recent post on Nostr, one of many Twitter alternatives that have popped up in the post-Musk era, OG Twitter developer Evan Henshaw-Plath (a.k.a. Rabble) wrote a critique of ActivityPub, the decentralized social network protocol that underpins the fediverse. “You can’t use a single fediverse identity with your profile and followers in Peertube, Mobilizon, … Read more

The latest monthly update of the TIOBE index asks, “Is PHP losing its mojo?” For the month of April, TIOBE’s programming language index ranked PHP 17th, “its lowest position ever.” It’s not just TIOBE that shows PHP declining in popularity. In the annual Stack Overflow developer survey, PHP has fallen from 30.7% in 2018 (i.e. … Read more

While the big AI companies are delving into legal gray areas trying to find new sources of data for their Large Language Models, the situation for website operators and publishers is much more black and white. Traffic to websites is drying up — and a full-on drought could be about to hit, as search engines … Read more

In the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Ruby on Rails was used by 5.49% of respondents. While that doesn’t seem like much, it’s higher than more modern web frameworks like Nuxt.js (3.69%), Deno (2.36%) and Gatsby (2.33%). The reality is, Ruby on Rails is still a fairly popular web framework, despite its heyday being … Read more

This week I attended FediForum, a two-day virtual event about fediverse technologies. The fediverse is a decentralized network of apps that connect together via the W3C ActivityPub protocol. Its biggest and most well-known app is Mastodon, the microblogging platform that Meta’s Threads is currently in the process of interconnecting with (via ActivityPub). What FediForum showed … Read more

There’s a lot of concern amongst website builders about the impact AI will have on web traffic. And it’s not just AI that web developers have to worry about. Google is phasing out third-party cookies by the end of 2024, social media referrals continue to decline, and mobile application platforms have a checkered history of … Read more