Brandon Satrom, Program Management Lead, Cross Platform Tools and Services with the Telerik Kendo UI Division, discussed developer’s challenges, future trends and feedback around JavaScript at the O’Reilly Fluent Conference with theCube co-host John Furrier and Jeff Frick.

The right tools

The conversations at Fluent are “proof of the ubiquity of this platform,” Satrom commented on JavaScript, “the only platform where everything you need to get going is a text editor and a web browser.” The conference attendants showed a lot of excitement and activity, talking about the projects they are working on – tools, libraries being built. “It’s been exciting to see that it is standing the test of time,” he added.

“Tooling is one of those things that [is] really interesting,” Satrom said.  A lot of people are making the move to mobile and “in mobile specifically the two biggest things that people are talking about are the tooling story and the performance story.” People want good tools to help them target as many devices as possible, they are looking for solutions, but also for the right tools.

The trade-offs in native vs. hybrid apps

A lot of companies that make the decision to go mobile have to first decide if they have the time, resources and people to develop native apps on all devices. “That continues to propagate, more platforms mean more issues” to tackle. If they choose hybrid apps, there might be inconsistencies between different mobile operating systems. Tooling could help tackle this issue, as a lot of developers that choose hybrid say that time to market is what matters, according to Satrom.

Commenting on the trade-off between creativity and efficiency in coding, Satrom said that, based on his 15 years of experience in the web development community, there has been a lot of growth in best practices, discipline, testing, and how libraries were evaluating.  Developers “are focusing on building value in apps. More and more people come in the community and want to automate” different tasks, allowing focus on adding value instead of doing the same repetitive tasks. People form a lot of other communities – .NET, Java, PHP – are joining the JavaScript community, bringing the practices from those world.

As far as the evolution of developers is concerned, JavaScript coding went from being “about writing as little code as possible to get to the server side” from the client, to more and more length from the server to the client. “You have this world where JavaScript is on the entire stack.”

HTML5, JavaScript are well-suited for hybrid mobile apps

“Mobile web performance and tooling around it is uncharted territory,” Satrom said. Providing mobile apps that look and feel as close to as native as possible is a challenge. In gaming, native is a great choice. But HTML5 and JavaScript are well suited to deliver viable hybrid apps for mobile.

Exploring different use cases, Satrom explained that the native approach is for companies that the time and resources to have separate native teams – 3-4 such teams for each native app, Facebook being a good example. In a lot of cases, companies are trying to get to market and try to work with as many devices and customers as possible. “On the framework side of things, there is definitely a case where that works with hybrid apps as well,” he said, giving apps for the realty business as an example.

Asked what developers need to watch out for in the next 5 years, Satrom mentioned the web making its way onto platforms. Web browsers are becoming the OS. “Web is not just about browsers, it’s about all devices. The web is a platform, we’re all devices.”