R/GA London Picks 5 Hot Technologies for 2013

At the end of 2012, Web Designer magazine asked the R/GA London technology team for our opinion on what would be “hot” for web design in 2013. After a bit of group discussion we put forward 5 things, which ended up being published over a frighteningly large photograph of my head! Those 5 things were Grunt, RequireJS, Websockets, WebRTC and “mobile first” responsive web design. Here’s a bit more background on why we chose what we chose.

Grunt and RequireJS are going to be big for R/GA London as we making them a mandatory part of our standard project “bootstrap”. I blogged about RequireJS earlier in 2012 and since then it seems to have really taken off. Grunt is another tool that will be in many developer toolkits in 2013 to tackle the growing complexity of front-end builds. A tool that automates linting, hinting, script concatenation, minification/uglification and unit testing independent of back-end technology is an obvious need. These tools definitely justify the learning curve and deserve to be hot.

Websockets and WebRTC aren’t in every browser yet but they will be soon. Some pundits claim that WebRTC bringing browser-to-browser video and audio will be as big a disruption to the telecommunications industry as the original World Wide Web. Potential creative applications remain unknown so this will be hugely exciting. Websockets maybe don’t offer the same disruptive impact as WebRTC but will empower developers to do something that has always been difficult with traditional HTTP applications – build, bi-directional, real-time communications between browser and server. This will enable compelling multi-player games to be built in pure HTML5 and JavaScript – but again, the creative possibilities are vast.

Finally, pretty much every project we are working on at the moment is now responsive design and a consensus has rapidly formed around the “mobile first” approach which has been championed by recognized thought-leaders in places like Future Friendly. It’s also helping to get people prototyping and even taking a “browser first” approach to design. This fosters a collaborative approach between UX, design and developers that is going to result in much better web design during 2013.