Peter Cooper, Founder of Cooper Press, discussed the highlights of this year’s O’Reilly Fluent Conference, major trends and next year’s plans with theCube co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick.

“We’ve gone to being more about the web platforms and less about pure JavaScript,” Cooper said, commenting on the evolution of the Fluent conference. There is more focus on things that are tied together with JavaScript, making room for talks about gaming and other directions where JavaScript wasn’t usually involved. This year, and more so next year, the conference focuses more on web platforms, not just JavaScript.

Discussing the trends of Fluent’s first day, Cooper highlighted Asm.js, a coding language that enables “producing a more optimized compiler for a limited subset of JavaScript” and thus runs a lot faster than normal JavaScript. “JavaScript has a reputation of being a slow language,” he said, but a lot of companies like Google put a lot of money into making it faster.

JavaScript is growing

Commenting on the expansion of JavaScript, Cooper mentioned that there used to be a certain thing for which JavaScript was used, and that mostly involved web forms. Now there are games being created with it, as well as applications for connected TVs and other media outlets. “It’s getting everywhere,” even on the iPads, becoming “a major way of making apps around.”

John Furrier pointed out that the Web 2.0 hype led to an explosion of web developers, and JavaScript became about a different mindset. Developers are required to create something that’s “amazing on the front end” and provides great user experiences. Cooper replied that engineers and code are a major focus for Fluent. Usually, “the guy (or girl) writing JavaScript wouldn’t have been the star of the show,” but Fluent is bringing them into the spotlight.

“The concentration of power now rests with developers,” Cooper says.  There is a lot you can use code for and there are so many different niches, you need certain skills to work with what’s available. Implementing JavaScript with everything else currently requires a great level of skill.

Addressing DevOps challenges

As DevOps is a fundamental part of the coding, exploring the biggest challenges and opportunities for developers is paramount, Furrier pointed out. Cooper responded that the biggest challenge that developers are facing, and that Fluent is addressing, is that they “can’t just say ‘I am a JavaScript developer,’ they can’t have just one language under their hat, they need to think of a web platform.” There are so many aspects to grasp. “People are being more eclectic,” they need to have a complete package of skills. Now they present themselves as”web platform developers,” not just JavaScript developers. “The web is a platform and it’s kind of the default platform right now.”

• Native vs. web apps

There currently is an ongoing argument between native apps and web, Cooper said, especially with the advances in responsive design. “That battle is going to carry on and we’ll see some kind of conclusion to it.” Even if things will look like apps, web will be in the background. “It’s not like web or native is going to win:” what will happen is, that which looks like an app will actually be web.

Commenting on responsive design and agile design, and their ability to work well together, John Furrier said that “responsive web development is the way to go, agile is a methodology to push code.” While on the web the two approaches can work well together, but mobile cannot really be agile.

Talking about what’s next for Fluent, Cooper said: “We’ve done a reasonable job getting the program together for Fluent. All I have to do is think about how this is going to relate to next year,” analyzing feedback and how it plays into future editions. “It’s going to be more web platform focused,” not just JavaScript, he added.