(October 2013) Panelists: Jonathan Stark (), Mobile Strategy Consultant and Series Host Kevin Smith (), General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel Doug Schepers (DW), Developer Relations Lead, W3C Abraham Elias (), Chief Technology Officer, Sencha Nolan Wright (), Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator Hello, I m Jonathan Stark. Welcome to Inside the Brackets. Today, we re taking a deeper look at the tools and resources available to app developers and how they impact your development strategy. Joining us today are Kevin Smith, General Manager of Mobile Computing and Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel; Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C; Abe Elias, CTO of Sencha, and Nolan Wright, CTO and Cofounder of Appcelerator. So, each of you represents a different tool or resource available to application developers. I d like to start by kind of going down the line and having each person sort of give us a feel for what it is that you do. So Kevin, let s start with you. What kind of tools does Intel make for app developers? Intel creates a set of tools designed to get started building your apps. We have various things that help you create the code initially. Then we have a set of tools for testing and emulating -- you want to make sure it runs right and looks good on your phone as well as your desktop. And then tools for publishing your app because a big part of HTML5 is expanding the reach, writing once and getting onto as many stores as possible. Let s jump to Abe, same question. Sencha was pretty much founded with the philosophy that the browser is the platform so we enable developers to build rich experiences inside the context of the browser, no matter what operating system you re on, no matter what browser you re on or doc type that you re using. And now today, no matter what device you re using. Excellent. And Nolan, you have a slightly different approach at Appcelerator. Can you describe that? Yeah, so we allow developers to use web technologies like JavaScript and XML, but we allow them to use those technologies and build native applications. But we also do support other types of app development, like we support hybrid. So if you
want to use web, you can use HTML, you can do that. We also support mobile web but primarily, our technology has been used to date for native development but using web technologies. Doug, the W3C doesn t really make development kits, but there s a lot of support documentation, that sort of thing. Can you talk about that for a second? Well, so nobody wants to read technical specifications. I write them and I don t want to read them, but you do need to know the fundamentals. And so, W3C teamed up with all the browser vendors and Adobe and Nokia and HP and Intel Intel of course. We decided to make a set of resources both tutorials and reference articles on how to use this increasingly complex open web platform. We made a conscious decision to make it not just something that we re pushing out to people but a community project. And so you can think of it as the Wikipedia for web developers. So Abe, it s been said that a carpenter s only as good as his tools. Do you feel like the same holds true for developers? Oh yeah, I think that holds true for any industry that you re in. So, we definitely love the standards bodies. We think that that is something that enables the future proof of the web and something that developers can bet on. And it s only going to get better, so what we do is we take those raw materials that exist within the web standards and we create the bricks and the windows and the doors to enable developers to construct a house, and know that it s going to have a solid foundation. I think it s really interesting, the whole notion of developer tools, and also things like JavaScript frameworks like jquery. It s really important that developers have these resources because it speeds up development so much and you don t want to have to write every component yourself every time. It s not going to be efficient. It s not going to be optimized. It s just not the right way to work, but you do need to understand the fundamentals of the thing you re working with. Use whatever tools you need to, but first, understand the fundamentals. And there s no better resource for a web developer than an army of smart web developers helping them. Yeah, I have to agree. It s that sense of, you know, we re cut from the same cloth and we re all trying to solve the same problems and And we re speaking the same language. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 2
And we re speaking the same language, absolutely. I think that s the power of the web: to bring like minds together in a very collaborative way. To Doug s notion of getting under the covers and being able to get down to pure JavaScript, if you will, or raw JavaScript, the Sencha architecture is very complicated for a JavaScript framework in my experience. Do you feel like it s conducive to getting under the hood and making changes like that? What we ve found is that, eventually, you get to the point where you have to respect the browser, and by just going ahead and allowing raw access to the underlying DOM via whichever methods are possible causes the browser to eventually hit, you know, the non-happy path is what we call it. So you could easily get yourself into trouble because you re operating on these relatively primitive APIs. So you have to build the layers on top of that in order to ensure that you never allow the developer to get into trouble. So that s where we, you know, as a framework vendor, we go ahead and make sure that we understand the use case that developers are using these fundamental APIs to create these experiences, and then we ensure that they don t get into trouble when they try to do that. Being able to go deeper and having more control, all that s fine, but one of the real benefits of HTML5 is that it s easy to learn You know, markup languages everyone can learn. And this intersection not just of JavaScript programming, but being able to have your designers working on the CSS and HTML part while your programmers are doing the JavaScript part. That fundamentally is one of the breakthroughs with this whole programming paradigm It s not just being able to write things in JavaScript. And if you have tools that are actually generating code for you, we feel it s really important that you can go in then and edit the JavaScript or the CSS and then bring it back into your tools Absolutely. And keep working both ways. It s not that we ve translated it into I guess one of my pet peeves is translating it into ON or something, rather than just leaving it as HTML and JavaScript. So I m curious because I know, Nolan, Appcelerator and Titanium have a very different approach to something like a really long list and how to make that work in the DOM. You sort of sidestep the whole problem by not having it in the DOM at all, right? Right. Our approach is really leveraging web technologies, but ultimately, everything s rendered natively, so it s using all the native APIs. But, much like what Sencha does, we do a lot of optimizations ourselves because we re crossplatform, so we support ios, Android, Blackberry and soon Windows Phone 8. So, there s a lot of things that we have to manage on behalf of the developer to make sure things are optimized. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 3
So Kevin, what do you see as some of the differences between the needs of web developers versus native developers? Native developers tend to write in the native language using native APIs and it really is about learning a whole ecosystem of things. If you re creating your iphone app in native, you have to learn Objective-C. But then you also have to learn all the Apple Coco APIs and everything else. If you really want to expand your reach, then you say well, then I want to go to Android and the Google Play Store. Okay, so now I got to learn Dalvik and a whole new set of APIs so, you know, that s the native approach. The beauty of HTML5, JavaScript and standardized APIs is really this write once and it s so much easier to learn HTML5 and JavaScript than, you know, C++ and C Sharp. The economics for development, the easier learning curve, the being able to maximize reach, you know, with a single code base, I think that s why HTML5 is really doing pretty well versus native app development. So I want to jump to Nolan on that. So you guys obviously feel like cross-platform is really important, but mostly felt that HTML is not the right approach and going with like actual native code generation; is that fair to say? I don t know if you d say we d say it s not the right approach. I think what we would say is we think mobile, unlike any kind of technology shift we ve seen, is really about user experience. So we look at it more around how can we give our developers and our customers the best tools to deliver that experience. We do support mobile web and hybrid, but we ll probably use more for native. So we have made a lot of investments on the native side to help, and it s for some of the same reasons you were talking about. We re trying to bring two worlds together, which is, you know, let people who have web technology skills be able to deliver native experiences because a lot of web developers are just kind of cut off from that. And Abe, what s the Sencha story? So, you know, sort of pure web development versus hybrid versus native and where do you guys fit in that scheme of things? Yeah, so I do think that there s somewhat of a spectrum where you look at code bases that are kind of throwaway in the sense of like a website. So there, you know, if they use the DOM, if they style in CSS, start in Photoshop and create whatever dynamic experience that they want, that code base probably may or may not be maintainable long term and usually the brand gets refreshed every so often. So that s the traditional web 1.0 type of experience that we see jquery playing a very prominent role there. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have the individualized platforms that exist; the Androids, the Windows Phone 8s, the Blackberries, you know, et cetera. And then somewhere in between these experiences, it would be nice to have HTML running at the same kind of performance that you have with these native APIs. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 4
Do you think that performance is the big separator or is it device APIs as to the device itself? We kind of disproved that native is the only way to get performance using, you know, our fast book. And the reason for that was that, it s all in the approach, right? So, if you take this approach where you think that the browser is just a dumping ground for DOM, right, just append and append and append, eventually, it s going to run out of memory. And the same thing would happen with native, there s not anything that is secret sauce that anyone does better than the rest, so you need some kind of abstraction layer to make those differences invisible to the developer. So you can create a native-like user experience using web technologies. So let s talk about the gaps between native tools and tools that are in HTML5. One of the differences between what s in the standard native development kit is a lot of extra performance tools. You don t see a lot of performance tools yet on HTML5. I think that s coming. You know, the Chrome dev tools have some really good things that most people use. That s one of the bigger differences. And then, they re providing a richer set of libraries than anyone has associated with any one development environment. So this is an oversimplification, but would it be fair to say that we shouldn t have to worry about performance if we use a JavaScript library that extracts all this stuff for us? Well, there s a fallacy that just because you write it native that your app s always going to be performing, right? That s true. It s smarter programmers really. You know, the same fallacy is that web is slow, right? So, it all really boils down to how well you re using the tools that are given to you and I think that you can create a very performant application on native, um, and the same thing with HTML5. But it s how well you use the tools that are available to you. I m going to respectfully differ a little bit. The developer should know how to optimize. They should know how to think about performance. It should be part of their mindset. And increasing the tools and the APIs are allowing them to expose, you know, performance issues. It s great if you use, you know, a tool or an environment that takes care of that for you, but you should also educate yourself about what are the possible things that I m going to run into here because you re not always going to be able to use 100 hundred percent a component somebody else built for you. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 5
Oh yeah, I agree with that. I do think that there s only so many hours in the day and - Absolutely. most of the developers that we work with are at jobs, right, so they have pressure to get this product out the door and have it work on as many devices as possible. No question. And I think that s where adopting, you know, a framework and saying, Hey, we re going to go focus on the problems that, you know, are pretty mundane and everybody has, and it s up to you to take your business requirements and then apply it to the job that you want to accomplish. Now, obviously, you guys are going to get into trouble, but we re going to be there to help you out. Now, there are other vendors that abstract it away too far where they don t even give out the source code to their libraries. We re open source and we give out our source code. We encourage developers, Get down into the guts, make sure you understand the philosophy that we took in order to make these performance optimizations but ultimately, hey, we want to make sure that you get a raise because you delivered on time and that you delivered an application that rocks. Yeah, I mean, I think a big reason why the web has become so huge and successful is view source. And without that, it would it would absolutely not be where it is today. But you know, 10 years ago, if I just viewed source and I learned a little bit of JavaScript, a little bit of CSS and a little bit of HTML, I could call myself a web developer. If you did that today, with the complexity of the platform, nobody would consider you a web developer. You need to educate yourself. You do need to view the source but you also need to be able to drill down and learn the documents, learn the languages, the APIs, et cetera, the properties and that s what Web Platform Docs is for. Yeah, there s a lot of magic going on now. Not as much as there was in the 90s. You could actually read it then. So you re talking about needing native capabilities and native APIs, and that comes with the price of complexity. And so, to deal with that complexity, we need good developer documentation. What should a new developer consider when they re picking one of these tools because it s a lot of work to learn Android and ios, maybe too much work to learn both of those natively, but it s also probably too much work to learn Sencha and Titanium. If you kind of have to pick a horse, what are the things that people should be considering when they are comparing these things? Let s start with Nolan. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 6
I do think there s a lot of value in web technologies and I think there s a lot of value in getting a good, solid grounding and understanding there because it s just going to make you more successful as you make different choices down the line. So I think that grounding in JavaScript and web technologies is really critical. I ll share with you why developers choose Sencha. Usually, they re not creating just one app they re creating lots of applications. And they re usually not focused on a single platform they re focusing on how do they create this application and get it out to as many platforms as possible. And the last reason is obviously futureproofing their application. So, when you choose HTML5, you can pretty much rest assured that this application s going to continue to work for the foreseeable future. For other developers, like native developers, they might be trying to create an application, a single app, they re an independent firm that is trying to build one app versus a hundred apps. There s an interesting dichotomy between choosing which platform you re going to build a particular app in versus what you, as a developer, are going to choose for your career path. And if you had asked the question in 2005, if someone asked, Should I learn Flash or HTML? Obviously now, I think the answer in retrospect was, you should learn HTML. But even those developers who learned Flash, if all they did was use the tool and they just used the UI and they didn t go any deeper, they re in trouble now. So it s less about what particular platform you choose and more about how you approach your life-long learning. So let s wrap up with thoughts from everyone. We ll start with Nolan. What are the key trends that you see in app development tools and what can we expect in the toolscape say in the next 3 to 5 years do you think? It is really more about putting more, I think, control and giving developers more information so they can make better decisions. With mobile, you really do need to worry about things like performance, so we re constantly trying to give developers more information, better tooling around that. And I do think there s an interesting opportunity to bring designers and developers to let them work better together, so we re exploring some different things from an R&D perspective; how can we bring those two worlds together in the most efficient way possible because we do believe that designers have such a new and central role in building apps today, more so than they did in the past. So Abe, next 3 to 5 years, what do you think the trends will be in tools? Well, I think they re all going to go HTML5. You took my answer. We can agree on those. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 7
Yeah, and the reason I say that is because you take a look at the viable candidates for number 3 in the space and they re all pretty much standardizing on HTML5 as a developer strategy. The other thing that we see as being a trend is going to be around just how do I delineate my data versus someone else s data on these devices? How do you make sure that there s a clean separation between what s mine and what s part of my job? Around tooling, we re just going to see pretty much parity with what native brings to the table as far as developer tools. So next 3 to 5 years, Doug, what does it look like from your perspective? Well, I m going to get really rich in the next 3 to 5 years. Awesome. But not doing what I m doing now. I have to echo what Abe said: that the power of HTML5 is going to increase. And that means that the complexity s going to increase, and we re going to have to have good documentation to deal with that. On the data point, I would be remiss if I did not mention the W3C s idea of linked open data because there s private data sources and there s public data sources, and actually having the same framework that allows you to access both of those having the skills translate into using both those sources, either government data, for example, or private data. I think data is going to be a really big part of the web going forward. New things are always happening. It s pretty exciting. I agree a lot with Nolan about the data feeds becoming more and more important and involved in just about every single app. The people who are creating apps today really are programmers. I mean, they re professional developers. I actually think with extra tooling and evolving standards that people we wouldn t call programmers are going to be able to create their own app. You know, somebody who never took a computer science course, doesn t know what a loop is, is going to be able to write a useful function by combining various data feeds and it s their own private app. It s not something that they re going to sell on the store; they might share with their friends. And I think it s really just going to democratize development. Yeah, we have a term inside of Sencha. We call them the Citizen Developer because they re democratizing development. Yeah, right. It ll be easier to write your own app than find the app you want in the stores. I m looking forward to that day. That s all the time we have today. Thank you to each of our guests and thanks for joining us on Inside The Brackets. Also, be sure to tune into our next episode where we ll examine HTML5 in the enterprise. See you next time. () Jonathan Stark, Mobile Strategy Consultant, Series Host () Kevin Smith, General Manager, Mobile Computing & Compilers, Developer Products Division, Intel () Doug Schepers, Developer Relations Lead, W3C () Abraham Elias, Chief Technology Officer, Sencha () Nolan Wright, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder, Appcelerator 8