by Auliman Arga, Analyst Programmer at Mitrais

As an ASP .NET developer sometimes I wonder which new programming language or framework I should learn to ensure my skills are up to date. As we all know today there are so many choices on how you want to build an application or software. Here are my top 3 language tips.

First is ReactJS. ReactJS is a library built on the Javascript language that was developed by Facebook. React enables developers to create dynamic web applications that rely on actively changed data without reloading the browser page. Its objective is to be fast, easy to use and scalable. In an application ReactJS deals with the user interface only. In the Model-View-Controller (MVC) template, ReactJS is used at the View level and can be used in tandem with other JavaScript libraries or frameworks.

I recommend ReactJS because this is what is trending now in many developer communities especially for web application developers and also it is a Javascript library which most ASP .NET developers should be already familiar with. Once you start to learn it you will discover its power for your web application. In addition, there is also React-Native which is a framework to build mobile applications, that is similar to ReactJS, in case you are tempted to cross over to mobile app development. To those who are interested in learning React you can try visiting codeacademy. com. The site provides step by step instructions on how to learn the basics of ReactJS in an easy to understand the way in my opinion.

Second is Java + Java Framework. From my point of view, Java is still one of the hot items at the enterprise level. Even today I still see more job opportunities for Java than .NET. Also, the Java programming language is quite similar to C#, so the language barrier is not much of a problem for .NET developers to jump to Java. From the point of view of a web developer, I think it is well worth your time to learn Spring MVC framework if you want to jump over to Java because even though it is not a new framework it is still reliable and popular among Java developers. Another thing to consider is that by learning Java you are also learning the native language for Android development if you want to jump into mobile application development someday.

My last choice, surprisingly, is ASP .NET Core. ASP .NET Core is the recently released framework by Microsoft that has open source licenses. Yes, you did not misread it, finally, Microsoft is going open source with their framework, something that should have been done by them long ago in my opinion. With it also comes cross-platform support so it can be natively hosted on Linux and Mac. Yes I know this is all still new and I don’t think it is yet in a mature state, but as a .NET developer I am really looking forward to this because I have never been able to host .NET Web applications using Mono on Linux before so probably .NET Core will make developing .NET application on other platforms other than Windows smoother and easier.

There are many popular languages out there that are commonly used for web development, such as Ruby, Python, PHP, etc. but I feel that my three recommendations are the closest to my background as an ASP .NET developer, and are for me the most interesting technologies to learn for now.

Cheerz! and happy coding.