The shift in web development

With all the things we discussed until now, it is crystal clear that the "Web" is evolving very fast. Let's summarize this:

• Documents to applications: The classical approach was to send a browser request to a server, which delivered a HTML document. Now, we think more and more in terms of applications running in a browser and interacting with a backend.

• Declarative HTML to programmatic DOM: When we needed dynamic features in the past, we had to use HTML tags to express what we needed within declarative HTML documents. Today, we use DOM and manipulate it before a page is displayed. Many frameworks do several runs on the DOM tree to manipulate elements, for example, for progressive enhancement features.

• Templates to APIs: In the past, we needed templates and dynamically filled in the needed data. Today, we simply call APIs from the browser with AJAX calls against SOAP or more typically REST services.

• Request/response to synchronization: Classically, we had a client...