Things have changed pretty fast from what was a decade ago for web development and the facts are totally mind-blowing. I mean a web developer now makes mobile apps, desktop app, backend API, games and so much more. A decade ago when we talked about being a web developer that used to mean someone who codes HTML, JavaScript & CSS and makes cool websites. Though you have C# or Java spring that but the defacto mode was JavaScript with PHP. Did you know that even Facebook was made with PHP and JavaScript! The old Mark was a PHP developer.

web developer a decade ago

Web Development a decade ago

Be thankful if you are a new developer because trust me! You would hate web development just a decade ago! First of all, nowadays if you are web developer having sound knowledge of JavaScript can not just make simple frontend websites but from backend API to mobile apps, you can do a lot of stuff with the JavaScript.

However, just a decade ago you didn’t have React, Angular or Node along with npm packages to help you out. This was the time of LAMP Stack where PHP was the king along with JavaScript which was not that good at the time and was slow. The modern ES6+ is filled so many cool technologies and is highly optimized along with providing you support for so many things. For Frontend, we use to have JQuery library ( still many people use it though we have ES6+ cool features & I believe it is not needed ) and for serverside PHP was leading.

The coming of client-side JS frameworks in 2010

2010 was the point where so many cool frameworks came to the picture of web development. The Ancestor to the modern JavaScript client-side frameworks and libraries that dominated just a decade ago are as follow:

• KnockoutJS ( release date: July 5, 2010 )
• AngularJS ( release date: October 20, 2010 )
• BackboneJS ( release date: October 13, 2010 )
• Underscore ( release date: October 28, 2009 )
• JQuery ( release date: August 26, 2006 )

React, Angular and Vue are dominating the market in 2020 but this was not the case 10 years ago. Knockout, AngularJS and backbone were the rising stars and were developers favourites.

MEAN / MERN Stack is the dominating stack in 2020 but a decade ago the LAMP Stack ( “L” Linux — “A” Apache — “M” MySQL — “P” PHP ) that was taking over the community by storm. This is how our old friend Mark Zuckenberg build Facebook back from his dorm for the first time.

However, at the end of 2010 things started to change with the launch of client-side frameworks and AngularJS was leading all the framework since it was powered by Google and was my first framework love.

#programming #nodejs #javascript #web-development #development