End of Web Servers and Gigantic Rise of JavaScript and Headless API Movement

This is an article I have been meaning to write for few weeks now. For the developer and IT folks the news is already well received. For the rest, I wanted to share the spectacular development of 'Headless' in Modern Software Architecture that has changed everything and made the modern 'Digital' possible.

Netscape, way back in the 1990's launched the web browser and also the web server. Web Servers was as basic to the Web as perhaps fuel to cars. It is/'was' the way you processed and served web pages. All the 'intelligence' and processing was done at server and relatively simple html marked up page was delivered to the Web Browser to display.

Cut to 2020, fb, gmail , netflix , linkedin, e2m.live and countless other platforms gives us phenomenal application design and interface on the browser, no less than downloaded apps. These coupled with the Mobile apps which have an 'arms length' to your backend server have changed the way software is developed.

Whether browser or mobile apps - they now call an API. The front end intelligence that was computed on web server is now computed at client side - courtesy JavaScript. JS Frameworks like React, View.JS and Angular have created a whole new job market . You can just search any major Digital platform for its job openings and there will be an opening for a JavaScript developer. Whats more, with he rise of NodeJS, its now on the server side as well. And to complete the circuit, even mobile apps can be created fully in JavaScript. Its a phenomenal rise of this Scripting language.

The result is you dont need Web Servers anymore. Smart JS frontends or mobile apps call API's to popular cloud destinations such as Google and AWS and the API then directly calls programming routines or end points. The result is super fast and scalable applications. You dont need load balancers for web servers now. You dont need Web Servers at all! The cloud functions scale automatically.

Our own successful Virtual Event platform https://e2m.live has immensely benefited from this revolution of Headless and Serverless technologies . It now scales effortlessly to tens of thousands of users concurrently, any given day. See https://www.bcrfluncheon.org/home as an example of a site created by us (Web Spiders ) with Angular and Drupal in headless fashion.

While the Web Server is on its way out, its features are distributed to different components in the modern tech stack. (and thats how it continues to live)

Any developer from a decade ago will appreciate the radical change in application architecture to develop auto-scale apps and rich front ends. Such rich front ends at one point were only possible with adobe flash but now work natively on the browser.

Whether e-commerce, virtual events, Line of Business Digital Transformation projects or consumer social apps - the modern day digital world would NOT have been possible without the rise of Javascript and Cloud Serverless and Headless architectures.

This change is more profound that what I can express in an article. I hope you find this useful, and please feel free to ping me on Linkedin or write at [email protected] .

Ciao,

Sid