9 Web Technologies Every Web Developer Must Know in 2023

Web development comes with a huge set of rules and techniques that every website developer should know about. If you want your website to look and work the way you want it to, you need to familiarize yourself with the web technologies that will help you achieve your goal.

 Developing an app or website usually involves knowing 3 main languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And while it sounds pretty complicated, once you know what you're doing, understanding web technology and how they work becomes much easier.

 Don't worry if it doesn't come easily to you right away. You may need more time, training, and patience to delve deeper into the topic, but you will end up with a good understanding.

 Here's an introduction to web technologies and a list of the latest web technologies, we hope it makes things a little easier for you. Let's take a look at it.

What is web technology?

You've probably heard the term "web development technology" before, but have you ever wondered what it actually means?

Since computers cannot communicate with each other the way humans do, they require codes instead. Web technologies are the markup languages such as HTML, XML, and XHTML and multimedia packages that computers use to communicate.

1. Browsers

Browsers request information and then show it to us in a way we understand. Think of them as interpreters for the web. Here are the most popular ones:

Google Chrome – Currently, the most popular browser brought to you by Google 

Safari – Apple’s web browser 

Firefox – Open-source browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation 

Internet Explorer – Microsoft’s browser

2. HTML & CSS

HTML is one of the first things you should learn. With HTML, web browsers know what to display when they receive a request. If you want to better understand how HTML works, you also need to know what CSS is.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and describes how HTML elements should be displayed on the screen. If you go through enough tutorials, you'll soon be creating CSS text effects, page transitions, hover effects on images, and more.

3. Web Development Frameworks

Web development frameworks are a starting point of items that a developer can use to avoid doing simple or mundane tasks, and instead, get right to work.

Angular

Angular is one of the latest web technologies designed specifically for developing dynamic web applications. With this framework, you can easily build front-end-based applications without using additional frameworks or plugins.

Features include well-designed templates, MVC architecture, code generation, code splitting, etc. All expressions are like code snippets that are enclosed in braces and do not use any loops or conditional statements.

If you would like to get started with Angular or just quickly evaluate whether this framework would be the right solution for your projects, you can check out this 3-hour training course published by Justin Schwartzenberger, Google Developer Expert in June 2019. This course covers everything necessary to get started with Angular, from basic architecture, working with the DOM, data binding, routing, and components to more advanced topics like directives and pipes.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a server-side website technology that makes application development much easier and faster. The thing that really sets this framework apart is the code reusability and some other cool features that help you get the job done in no time.

Popular websites written with Ruby include Basecamp, Ask. fm, GitHub, 500px, and many others.

YII

Yii is an open-source web application development framework built in PHP5. It is optimized for performance and comes with a number of great tools for debugging and app testing. Another plus is that it is quite simple and easy to use.

Meteor JS

Meteor JS is written in Node.js and allows you to build real-time web applications for various platforms. A framework for building simple websites for personal use with Meteor JS really stands out.

It is an open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework, which also means that the loading time of the web page is significantly shorter. The JavaScript stack also allows you to get the same results with fewer lines of code than usual.

Express.js

Express.js, developed in Node.js, is a web development framework that is great for those who need to develop applications and APIs as quickly as possible. Many great features are provided by plugins.

Zend

Zend is an open-source framework based on PHP, focused on creating more secure and reliable web applications and services. It is one of the first enterprise-level MVC frameworks that came before current superhits like Laravel or Symfony, and many popular PHP engines like Magento were built in Zend.

Today, Zend is still in development, and while it may be less popular than its open-source siblings, it's a great solution for a large-scale PHP application.

Django

Django is one of the most popular frameworks written in Python and follows the MVC architecture. Thanks to its simplicity, it greatly facilitates the application development process.

Django greatly simplifies the use of Python and provides several tools that make life easier for web developers - eg ORM, Models, Django admin, templates, etc.

Laravel

Laravel is a PHP development framework ideal for small websites. It comes with a number of useful features including MVC support, object-oriented libraries, Artisan, authorization techniques, database migration, etc.

Currently, it is one of the most community-supported and community-developed frameworks and since PHP has Laravel, one of the largest communities, is a great tool that powers both small websites and large B2B portals managing millions of transactions daily.

4. Programming Languages

As we explained earlier, since computers don't use languages that are anything like human languages, they need a different way to communicate. Here are some of the most popular programming languages:

Javascript – used by all web browsers, Meteor, and lots of other frameworks 

CoffeeScript – a “dialect” of JavaScript. It is viewed as simpler but it converts back into JavaScript 

Python – used by the Django framework as well as in the majority of mathematical calculations 

Ruby – used by the Ruby on Rails framework 

PHP – used by WordPress to create those WYSIWYG editors that everyone is using now. It’s also used by Facebook, Wikipedia, and other major sites 

Go – newer language, built for speed 

Swift – Apple’s newest programming language 

Java – used by Android and a lot of desktop applications. 

So let’s talk about the most popular ones in a bit more detail.

JavaScript

According to StackOverflow's annual survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language, with 62.5% of respondents saying they use it.

JavaScript (JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, or just-in-time compiled programming language with first-class features. Although it is best known as a scripting language for websites, it is also used by many browserless environments, such as Node.js, Apache CouchDB, and Adobe Acrobat. JavaScript is a prototype-based, multi-paradigmatic, single-threaded, dynamic language that supports object-oriented, imperative, and declarative (eg, functional programming) styles.

Ruby

Developers love Ruby – and for all the right reasons. Designed to be user-friendly and really easy to use, this programming language is no wonder it is often called "the programmer's best friend".

What you can expect from Ruby is shorter and more readable code. Unfortunately, this sometimes means lower efficiency compared to other programming languages - but also higher productivity.

If you are new to the world of web development, Ruby would be a great choice for the first programming language you want to learn. Well-written Ruby code can be almost as readable as a sentence in plain English.

Elixir

Elixir appeared back in 2011 and gained popularity almost immediately. It was inspired by Erlang, a language developed in the 1980s by Ericsson. Elixir author José Valim himself said that he loved Erlang, but also noticed some things that could be improved a bit.

Scala

Scala stands for Scalable Language and is one of many attempts to "rewrite Java" and is compiled to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It's safe to say that this programming language has proven to be quite successful, considering that companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, and The Guardian use it in their codebases. Scala is known as a complex language, but also a language worth learning.

5. Protocols

The instructions for how to pass information back and forth between computers and devices are commonly known as protocols.

HTTP

This protocol makes every web page reach the browser. The protocol requests a website from a Google server and then receives a response with the website's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

DDP

It uses WebSockets to establish a consistent connection between the client and the server. As a result, you get real-time website updates without having to refresh your browser.

REST

Used mostly for APIs, this protocol has standard methods like GET, POST, and PUT that allow information to be exchanged between applications.

6. API

An API (application programming interface) allows other developers to use some of the app's features without sharing code.

Endpoints are exposed by developers, while the API can control access using an API key. Examples of well-built APIs are those created by Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their web services.

7. Data formats

Data is stored in a structure called a data format.

JSON – JavaScript Object Notation is a syntax for storing and exchanging data (just like XML). It is currently becoming the most popular data format out there.

XML – Predominantly used by Microsoft systems, it used to be the most popular data format.

CSV – is data formatted by commas; for example Excel data.

8. Client (or Client-side)

Each user of the application is called a client. Clients can be computers, mobile devices, tablets, etc. Usually, multiple clients communicate with the same application stored on the server.

9. Server (or Server-side)

Application code is usually stored on the server. Clients make requests to servers. After collecting the required information, the servers will respond to these requests.

Ending thoughts on the latest web technologies

To stay up to date with the latest web technologies, one needs to keep learning new things. Web technologies are constantly being improved and updated, and every web development team should take advantage of this whenever possible.

New web technologies are changing the entire web development process and sometimes it can be difficult to understand everything in the right way. Fortunately, with the right internet technology tutorial, you should be learning more about them in no time.