Transcript for Episode 1: Why I Oughta

Transcription

1 (August 2013) Panelists: Jonathan Stark (), Mobile Strategy Consultant and Series Host Brian LeRoux (), Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems Michael Rasalan (), Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation Mike Richmond (), Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation Hello, I m Jonathan Stark and this is Inside The Brackets. Today, our premier show is HTML5: Why I oughta. And with that, let s introduce our guests. First, I have Brian LeRoux, Product Manager of PhoneGap and Topcoat at Adobe, Michael Rasalan, Director of Research at Evans Data and Mike Richmond, an Architect from Intel s Open Source Technology Center. Thanks to each of you for being here today. Thanks, Jon. Thanks a lot. So, I d like to start with a fundamental question for Mike. Why should the computing industry care about HTML5? Well, what s happening now is that HTML5 is breaking out of the confines of the web and the browser and it s being used to build actual applications, so that makes it a topic of interest to the entire software development community and to people planning applications and application strategies. Excellent. Why does Intel specifically care about HTML5? It s a chip maker, right? Intel cares about HTML5 because we care about software development productivity. If you can t get new experiences, you re not going to buy a new device. And of course, we care about you buying new devices. Right. I guess that makes sense. Great, well, thanks for that. So Brian, you re at Adobe? I m at Adobe. Didn t Adobe used to make something called Flash and Flex and

2 Woo, yeah, we still do. Adobe makes all kinds of software. Flash and Flex are our answer to building more high-performance applications for mobile, more structured applications and apps for people that still write action script. But Adobe today is definitely more focused on HTML and HTML5 especially, and PhoneGap for building mobile applications. We re seeing more and more people embrace web and web technologies for different deployment targets besides just the web browser. As Mike mentioned, we re seeing it hit mobile apps and Adobe wants to be a part of that publishing process for creatives. So Michael, what does your research show about HTML5 adoption among developers? I think right now, about half of all developers in the world are using HTML5 in their development in some capacity. That s about 8.6 million developers. If you look at those who are just planning to do so, that s about 28 percent. And if you look at just the subset who are working on mobile, 60 percent of them are using HTML5 in some part of their development work. I ve heard different numbers thrown around and I have no idea. I don t know how you could actually quantify or count. It seems like there s so many different kinds of content creators now that it s tricky. The crusty old dude who writes J2E apps is probably building HTML apps and he s probably considered a developer. But the 16-year-old kid that picks up Dreamweaver, is he a developer? Yeah, I think HTML5 has become more widespread in use. There are fewer barriers, there are fewer obstacles. And I think that the definition of what a developer is has been dynamic and is expanding. Yeah, yeah, I agree completely. So you mentioned that half and up to 60 percent on mobile are using HTML5, but what about the people who aren t using HTML5? Do you have any numbers on that? The percentage of the developer population who don t use HTML5 has been around 20 percent. And it s been constant. Do you know what kind of development they do? Is it just service side stuff or it doesn t apply or It s actually a pretty diverse group. We ve seen that, among the people who don t have any plans for HTML5, they re more involved in things like OEM application development. Many of them are involved in scientific and technical software. We still see some bit of the enterprise segment still not embracing HTML5. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Software Consultant, Host () Brian LeRoux, Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems () Michael Rasalan, Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation () Mike Richmond, Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation 2

3 Mike, it s clear that there is a lot of momentum behind HTML5. What do you think are the aspects of HTML5 that make it attractive to developers? Well, it s a higher level of abstraction than traditional native programming just the same way that traditional native programming in a language like C, that we now call traditional, was once the disruptor, and assembly language programming was what people did. The facilities that the browser or a web runtime offers are such that they relive the programmer of taking care of details like memory allocation or garbage collection. The people that are writing these web engines are some of the best native programmers in the world, and they do a great job of taking the elements of HTML5 using CSS and laying things out on a screen in a very, very efficient way. What would you say are the main challenges facing a HTML5 developer today? By far and away right now, the biggest problem that we re seeing is performance. We hear about it all the time HTML5 is slow Web apps are slow JavaScript is slow. And it s a tricky conversation because slow compared to what is the first question you have to ask. If we re not benchmarking them, we don t know. Is it too slow to do your job? Probably not and we re finding that while JavaScript is arguably definitely always going to be slower than the native equivalents, there s a lot of exciting technology coming out slowly but soon to allow more parallelism, to allow code to be compiled using things like ASM.js to get native speeds. And we re not seeing any problems there. We are seeing problems with the DOM. The DOM, the Document Object Model, is what is the guts of an HTML page, and when you manipulate that DOM, you cause what s called a layout or reflow. When you reflow the content, you can get jank. Jank is in the dictionary. I actually looked this up a little while ago. People are saying janky all the time, and I m like, Is that even a word? So, it is, anyways. You see this jankiness and it s from the DOM. It s from interacting and touching the DOM because what happens when you interact with the Document Object Model is you have to repaint this whole page, and that s where we typically will see the browser lock up because it s single threaded, user interaction has been blocked, and it feels janky. So we re doing a lot of studying and thinking about how we can fix this, and it s a lot more about practices and education than it is about actual problems with the web browser itself. Most of these cases, we can find that just writing good CSS is a part of the problem, and, uh, teaching developers how to write good CSS is something that we re trying to address in a new project at Adobe called Topcoat. I think one of the big performance challenges for HTML5 isn t that my app is slow, it s my app is slow and I don t know why. And it turns out that being able to help developers figure out what it is they ve done that is slowing things down is probably the biggest area for improvement that I see so, instrumentation. And then there are also developers that are doing things by hand, coding to the spec when they actually ought to be using a library that has basically solved all these problems for them. That s really the key to productivity. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Software Consultant, Host () Brian LeRoux, Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems () Michael Rasalan, Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation () Mike Richmond, Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation 3

4 The big benefit of a library, especially an open source one, is they get battle tested and they get exposure to all these weird Android phones that nobody has except for people in China apparently. I think one of the least appreciated aspects of what s happening with HTML and JavaScript is the interaction with open source to create these tools and libraries that increase the productivity of the community at large. And so, it doesn t matter if there are differences between IE and Chrome and Firefox if you re using a library like jquery or something like TopCoat where professionals are burning the midnight oil to make sure that all those things are tested on all the devices. And so as a developer, you just use one of those and the problem of cross-platform compatibility and performance is essentially solved for you. We re seeing a new collaborative browser war where everyone s working together in the HTML5 spec and other specs at W3C to create a compatible surface. There s one part of that surface that isn t compatible and that s dev tools. If you shift between Chrome and Firefox and IE, you have completely developer-tool specific experiences. And so the interesting thing to me is a lot of these dev tools are building up around classical software ideas. So we ve got ideas around performance. Oh, I want to get into benchmarking mode. I m going to do some performance analysis, so I ll put on my performance hat. And that s what a game developer would do. He d build the app really quickly and then he d be like, Oh God, this thing is slow, let s do some benchmarking. Let s speed this thing up and optimize it. Web developers don t do that. They just ignore that part of the problem. Web developers are like, I m building an app. This looks pretty sweet on my browser. Deploy. And we need to find a way to get these tools to work together to standardize so that we can have a consistent surface for the development experience as well as the display experience. And we also need to think about how developers work. Web developers don t put on their performance-optimizing hat because they may or may not know that they even do that as a part of their job. What are developers saying are giving them a really hard time with HTML5? In general, developers are saying that it s hard to debug. It s hard to test for multiple devices. Developers who want to deploy their apps to app stores sometimes have a hard time submitting their apps. So there s a submission problem as well. So does that tie into monetization? That s a big problem. I don t know, ask ebay or Google or Amazon. The web is very monetizable. If you can create value, which you can do pretty easily with the distribution of the web, you can turn that into money at some point. It seems simplistic, but it s true. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Software Consultant, Host () Brian LeRoux, Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems () Michael Rasalan, Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation () Mike Richmond, Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation 4

5 One of the challenges for development using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for apps has been the fact that up until a couple of years ago, the standards were really oriented towards websites and web browsers. There was a cognitive breakthrough a couple of years ago where they said, You know, there s a difference between a web browser and a runtime that s part of a mobile platform or part of something like Windows 8 modern where you can have access to all those things because you re not also, in that same piece of software, going to be having history and cookies. Once the W3C realized that that distinction was important, they established a System Application Working Group, brought together people from companies like Intel and from the Mozilla Project, because you ve got Tizen, you ve got Firefox OS, both of which are focused on these kinds of applications for devices and that s where these APIs are being worked on. And that s why you see now a potential acceleration of application development. And then you have PhoneGap and the Cordova Project which is essentially bringing those kinds of APIs to the installed base of Android and ios and Blackberry and so on. Brian, do you think that some of the you know, because of this cognitive break as you put it do you think that some of those features will eventually trickle into a standard browser in some form? Most have, or many have. So, device APIs have worked their way into the browser pretty consistently and are getting good traction. We see camera access through the media capture API today, which allows you to declaratively invoke a camera application which a user clicks something and says Yes, I want you to use my camera, so there s a permission mechanism there, an opt-in. We see device orientation, device motion, so we can get access to that. We see fullscreen lock APIs, web RTC s just around the corner, which means we get full duplex binary communication which is video conferencing or whatever. So, the APIs aren t such a big deal, but the permission model that Mike was talking about is definitely a problem. I view PhoneGap as kind of like legacy software nowadays. And this is just like thinking 10 years into the future, but we look at Google, Chrome OS, Win for Microsoft, Firefox OS from Mozilla, Tizen from Samsung and Intel. That s the future. That s what we re looking at; packaged web applications for sure. I think the key is that, if you are using web technologies to build apps, you have the opportunity to have those apps run on multiple platforms with less work which should give you time to add value either by doing new, cool features in web technologies or perhaps some cool extension to the platform using native code that you incorporate using something like Cordova or PhoneGap that makes your app stand out and do things that your competition s apps can t do. So what has Intel been doing to address some of the gaps that we ve been talking about here? We re very active in standards groups to have new APIs for accessing features in the platform. We re very active in performance measurement and () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Software Consultant, Host () Brian LeRoux, Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems () Michael Rasalan, Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation () Mike Richmond, Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation 5

6 instrumentation of web runtimes and browsers and pushing fixes to improve performance upstream into the open source projects that are behind many of the web browsers and web runtimes, like Chrome, Mozilla and Safari. We have a very interesting tools product called the Intel XDK that s aimed at developers who may not have used HTML5 before and want to try it it s an all-in-one tool. And we have a developer program that s very focused on educating traditional native developers in HTML5 and what it can do for them. I imagine Adobe, being a big tools company, has a whole bunch of things going on in this area. We take a similar kind of approach or view on the web as what you see at Intel, sort of a top down and a bottom up. In the top down, at a high level, we re interacting with the standards groups to see that the long game is going to work out. A little farther down that stack, we re contributing features to Blink, Chromium and Mozilla as well. We re also doing Cordova at Apache, which is the open source roots for PhoneGap. And then all the Edge tool suite. What we want at Adobe is to make it easy for creatives to create content that targets the web. Edge Reflow is a tool for building responsive websites. Then there s Brackets which is a code editor. So, we ve got our fingers in lots of pies. We re doing all kinds of web stuff. You mentioned responsive tools for responsive design. This is one of the most exciting areas I think of this web technology. One of the hardest things to do in any programming environment is to or web environment for that matter one of the hardest things to do is to have code which works on a small screen and a big screen. The transition from HTML4 to HTML5 brought to the web the ability to separate layout from content, and design from programming logic. And so you can use CSS media queries to say Hey, how big is the screen, and you can make the layout of the page vary. The Boston Globe was one of the first sites to really show how that s done. It s still one of the best demos where you go to BostonGlobe.com, you take your desktop web browser, you shrink the window and as you shrink it, it magically seems to turn into a mobile site. To be able to bring that capability to the application world It s so awesome. That s unbelievable. That is so amazing and what that means is that, if you re an application developer, you don t have to worry when Oh, look, here s the new tablet that is a big hit with a 9-inch screen versus the thing that was a phone that was a 5-inch screen. Or maybe it turns into a wearable or something. A watch. It s going to happen, right? Right. And it makes you think more carefully about your fundamental design right up front but pays huge dividends in the end. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Software Consultant, Host () Brian LeRoux, Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems () Michael Rasalan, Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation () Mike Richmond, Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation 6

7 So Mike, where do you think HTML5 is going? What do you think the future holds for HTML5? I think you re going to see more complete device capability being exposed to the JavaScript programmer, so more APIs, more ability to actually get inside and see what the device is doing. I think you re going to see much better performance instrumentation for developers that are developing using this technology. I think you re going to see increasing exploitation of parallelism at multiple levels. So, Mozilla is working on a technology called Parallel JavaScript that actually lets you express algorithms in parallel, the kind of things that you might have used a math library for, for some complex calculation. But there ll also be increasing application of parallelism inside the browsers and web runtimes so that they scale better when you have more cores. All right, well, we re almost out of time. I d love it if each of you could take, just in one or two sentences, give us an idea why you think a developer should take a web-first, HTML5-first approach. We can start with Mike. I think that developers ought to look at HTML5 first for any project because why spend time moving an application from platform to platform by recoding when you can just redeploy it for that new platform. Michael? Eventually, we may get to a point where you can t tell whether something is a web app or an HTML5-based application. I think that we re already there now in certain cases. And Brian? The business drivers are good, you know distribution, skill reuse, that s awesome but there s another angle to the web that I think is important and should come up once in a while. It s probably humanity s greatest asset, and it s something that we can all participate in. The W3C is an open community of people that can drive the standards, and browsers are for the most part open source, too, and you can be a part of that. Even just building web content, you re helping contribute to this larger thing. I think that s a worthwhile reason to. Great. Great stuff, everyone. Thank you very much. Today, we ve heard about the key benefits of HTML5. We talked about gaps and how they re being addressed. We ve learned about some of the tools available to help developers and got a glimpse of where things are headed in the future. Thanks for watching. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Software Consultant, Host () Brian LeRoux, Principal Product Manager of PhoneGap and TopCoat, Adobe Systems () Michael Rasalan, Director of Research, Evans Data Corporation () Mike Richmond, Architect, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation 7