SharePoint Framework for developers

Let me start with simply stating this is the best news I heard about SharePoint as a developer. As it is announced at the Future of SharePoint, SharePoint Framework is a Page and Part model that enables fully supported client-side development. This means the client-side development models on SharePoint just got even better. 

Microsoft has been very busy providing new APIs frequently for supporting multiple technology stacks throughout the past few years and they kept trying making these APIs platform independent with the JavaScript and REST API support. This is made even simpler and understandable with the support of the Microsoft Graph API though it is still at a level of gaining the best maturity when accessing Office 365 components. 

As it is blogged on Office Blog, the components associated with a SharePoint page will be as follows.

• Custom Presentation - Client Side and Open Source availability has been a key focus and it keeps evolving as the demand goes high. More and more investment to this will enable many technologies to be SharePoint development enable. Users have different preferences for their client side scripting frameworks as several frameworks keep growing at a single time. 

• UX Extensions - The new webparts demonstrations look awesome and hoping to hear more news on this as things keep growing.

• Data Access - I am assuming the expansion of the REST capabilities and more operations that what is already there. 

• Web Hooks and Web Sockets - This is the most interesting part for me. Web sockets allow us to build more live connections to the source of data. This can solve many concurrency issues as it has been a sort of a challenge with the existing client side implementations unless specifically addressed. REST API has the ETag value to ensure updates are protected but the possible distraction for the user cannot be avoided with that. Web Sockets and Web Hooks will provide much meaningful implementations to the developers. 

•   Solution Host - More and more adopting to the cloud means more and more betterment for the implementations assuming the certain bearers are taken care of. 

Page Experience

The four components of the new SharePoint Framework page structure makes it an up-to-date as well as secured as good old server-side pages. Data Broker, Caching, Authentication and Telemetry will make sure the page performance improvements to a considerable extend. 

With the growth of the surrounding technologies for the client side, its been a big complain that SharePoint's capabilities are late to get updated. But this looks more satisfying to even the future requirements. 

Now we have to wait. Wait for the third quarter and see how this actually impresses developers and ultimately the users.