What Front‑End Trends Will Shape 2021? Serverless, AI, and New Tooling

2021 Front‑End Changes

On Zhihu, a question titled “What new changes will front‑end have in 2021?” received over 61,000 reads and 444 approvals, indicating strong community interest in future trends.

Stability and Deep Exploration

The front‑end landscape has become more stable, moving from the rapid framework wars of 2013‑2017 to deeper exploration in areas such as Ant Financial’s X6 for graphics, Taobao’s Midway‑FaaS for serverless, and complex products like Yuque, DingTalk Docs, and online Excel.

Serverless and Intelligent Front‑End

The author, who transitioned from PHP to Node.js and later to serverless‑side rendering, believes serverless will become the new infrastructure for front‑end, while intelligent front‑end development offers greater impact on business metrics.

http import Will Become Mainstream

Deno introduced a novel approach to module loading, and CDN services such as jspm.io, skypack.dev, and pika.dev already convert CJS to ESM. Node.js is expected to follow soon.

<code>import cheerio from "https://dev.jspm.io/npm:cheerio/index.js";</code>

See the article “2021 Re‑examining Deno (Thoughts on CDN for JavaScript modules)”.

Logic Orchestration for Developers

Projects like imove address the challenges of mutable and non‑intuitive logic by visualizing configuration‑driven workflows at the function level.

Intelligent UI Refinement

Server‑side search has hit its ceiling; intelligent UI and front‑end UI research are seen as incremental ways to boost business metrics. References include articles on intelligent UI and CBU best practices.

Intelligent PRD → Code (P2C)

By treating design‑to‑code as a D2C problem and introducing PD‑style annotations, the workflow aims for fully automated, intelligent code generation.

Front‑End Can Do Machine Learning Without Python

Pipcook, an AI framework based on a pipeline concept, enables front‑end developers to perform machine learning tasks without needing Python.

Open‑Source Projects I Follow

midway‑hooks – a leading serverless‑isomorphic framework ( https://github.com/midwayjs/hooks )

imove – a logic‑orchestration tool built on X6 and formrender ( https://github.com/imgcook/imove )

ykfe/ssr – a serverless‑based SSR solution supporting multiple FaaS environments ( https://github.com/ykfe/ssr )

airpack – an internal Alibaba tool for HTTP import and CJS‑to‑ESM conversion, reportedly 20× faster than webpack 5

Uncertain: React Server Component

Further investigation is needed to understand its potential.

Winter and Zhenzi Discuss Front‑End Intelligence

Two video sessions on Bilibili explore Taobao’s front‑end intelligence initiatives.

Conclusion

In 2020, many companies struggled with legacy projects and the need for development efficiency. Server‑side algorithms and traditional front‑end infrastructure have reached performance ceilings. The author argues that front‑end intelligence—combining UI, P2C, Pipcook, and emerging tools like airpack—represents the most promising direction for 2021.