(T) San Francisco has certainly one of the best engineering workforces for Web front-end technologies. I am trying to attend many developer meetings as I can. But there is so much innovation, that it is a little bit challenging to keep up with every new technology. Following are the key trends that I have seen taking shape in the last few months:

Web Components:

Web Components enables to develop rich and interactive widgets that can be re-used across Web applications without the need for extra libraries.
As of today, there are five Web components being specified at the W3C, namely:

– Templates, which define chunks of markup that are inert but can be activated for use later.
– Decorators, which apply templates based on CSS selectors to affect rich visual and behavioral changes to documents.
– Custom Elements, which let authors define their own elements, with new tag names and new script interfaces.
– Shadow DOM, which encapsulates a DOM subtree for a more reliable composition of user interface elements.
–Imports, which defines how templates, decorators and custom elements are packaged loaded as a resource.

For more:
W3C Working Draft
Web Components Presentation @ Google IO 2013

Polymer:

While different browsers support the Web Components with various levels of depth and breath, Polymer provides the libraries to develop Web Components that can run across all the major modern browsers. Nice!

For more:
The Polymer Project

WebRTC:

WebRTC is a suite of JavaScript libraries which provide real-time browser-to-browser communication for audio, video, and data.

There are three major libraries:

–Acquiring audio from the microphone and video from the camera: getUserMedia
–Communicating audio and video: RTCPeerConnection
–Communicating data over a peer-to-peer connection: RTCDataChannels

For more:
W3C Working Draft
WebRTC Presentation @ Google IO 2013

HTTP 2:

HTTP 2 is the new version of the HTTP protocol. The major goal of HTTP 2 is to improve the performance of the protocol: performance for the end-user by improving the response time of HTTP; performance in the network by improving the bandwidth required.

HTTP 2 main protocol features include:

–Compression of the header
–Multiplexing request-response: TCP connections are multiplexed to enable parallel request-response over the same connection
-Server push: allows the server to suggest to the client which page requisites are needed for this page
-TLS tunneling: optionally encrypt connections to protect them in particular from proxies and intermediary nodes

Note that most of the specifications for HTTP 2 originated from Google’s SPDY protocol.

For more:
HTTP 2 IETF Internet-Draft

Note: The picture above is apparently a butterfly coming from far away in my garden.

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