For the last few years? Looking at the answers so far, I think a lot of us have short memories!
Depending what few means, my list is below. Some of these things may have been the new hotness when you ducked out, but I'm listing what has become mainstream:
- MVC, makes building websites more robust, every major language has a framework for this now
- ORMs, every framework has a pluggable object-relational mapper for getting rid of your basic CRUD code
- Ruby on Rails or Django (Python) are mainstream ways to develop web applications. Both based on MVC.
- People still hate PHP, but it's still incredibly popular
- Internally a lot of companies still use ASP.Net, it's still awful, but ASP.Net MVC is pretty good
- In data transfer JSON is king, XML is dying, SOAP is dead (thank god)
- if you're developing a sales site, include a/b testing
- The rise of the API, lots of online services now offer online APIs. You can also plug a lot of functionality onto your website by using other people's services (e.g. uservoice.com for feedback, visualwebsiteoptimizer.com for a/b testing)
- Javascript frameworks make writing javascript much better, jQuery has pretty much won the framework war
- Lots of plugins are available for the js frameworks. No more having to roll your own table sorting solution
- Cloud Computing can be a cheap, reliable and scalable way to launch an app now. At minimum know about Amazon s3 (storage), but you can now host whole applications on scalable systems
- OAuth, you don't need to roll your own login system anymore for certain types of web application
Oh yeah, and for web design:
- Use divs, not tables for layout. No-one even argues about this one anymore
- Wordpress + a theme is an acceptable way to create a good looking website
- Know the basics of SEO, your clients often will
- As a rule of thumb, if you're nesting lots of divs, you're probably doing it wrong
- use a reset.css. A lot of people also use a grid for layout, something like 960.gs
- Html5, we're getting some more tags (mainstream soonish, probably when IE9 is released as I'm guessing most IE8 users will upgrade; IE8 doesn't really support the good bits). Depressingly being lauded as amazing when it's actually very meh. Still mandatory learning though.
- The browser landscape has shifted dramatically, IE is dying properly now, Firefox is mainstream, Chrome is amazing, Safari is used a lot more because Macs sell more as do IPhones (you probably can't have missed this ;)
Depending what few means, my list is below. Some of these things may have been the new hotness when you ducked out, but I'm listing what has become mainstream:
- MVC, makes building websites more robust, every major language has a framework for this now
- ORMs, every framework has a pluggable object-relational mapper for getting rid of your basic CRUD code
- Ruby on Rails or Django (Python) are mainstream ways to develop web applications. Both based on MVC.
- People still hate PHP, but it's still incredibly popular
- Internally a lot of companies still use ASP.Net, it's still awful, but ASP.Net MVC is pretty good
- In data transfer JSON is king, XML is dying, SOAP is dead (thank god)
- if you're developing a sales site, include a/b testing
- The rise of the API, lots of online services now offer online APIs. You can also plug a lot of functionality onto your website by using other people's services (e.g. uservoice.com for feedback, visualwebsiteoptimizer.com for a/b testing)
- Javascript frameworks make writing javascript much better, jQuery has pretty much won the framework war
- Lots of plugins are available for the js frameworks. No more having to roll your own table sorting solution
- Cloud Computing can be a cheap, reliable and scalable way to launch an app now. At minimum know about Amazon s3 (storage), but you can now host whole applications on scalable systems
- OAuth, you don't need to roll your own login system anymore for certain types of web application
Oh yeah, and for web design:
- Use divs, not tables for layout. No-one even argues about this one anymore
- Wordpress + a theme is an acceptable way to create a good looking website
- Know the basics of SEO, your clients often will
- As a rule of thumb, if you're nesting lots of divs, you're probably doing it wrong
- use a reset.css. A lot of people also use a grid for layout, something like 960.gs
- Html5, we're getting some more tags (mainstream soonish, probably when IE9 is released as I'm guessing most IE8 users will upgrade; IE8 doesn't really support the good bits). Depressingly being lauded as amazing when it's actually very meh. Still mandatory learning though.
- The browser landscape has shifted dramatically, IE is dying properly now, Firefox is mainstream, Chrome is amazing, Safari is used a lot more because Macs sell more as do IPhones (you probably can't have missed this ;)