Colt McAnlis, Game Developer Advocate at Google, discussed mobile and web performance from a developer perspective, along with web gaming trends, with theCUBE host Dave Vellante, live at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara.

“The web is a very technical, very complex stack,” McAnlis said. “Translating where the internal engineers are pushing the web forward and where the external developers push the web forward,” being a huge part of his role with Google.  “We have to work with each of them and find where the medium value is.” That is why conferences as Velocity help, “we talk to the best and the brightest on performance, and set our course.”

“Everyone’s got their own perfect world,” McAnlis said, commenting on Google’s decision to move to Blink. “We kind of looked at where we wanted Chrome to go and the web to go.” Talking about the making and communicating such decisions, he explained that “it’s a multi-tier process” that “starts with ‘is it the right decision?'” For each decision taken, there are thousands of man hours spent on debating it, testing it, and evaluating the benefits. “We make small changes that will affect how a product works live. Our small change can have a big effect on someone’s business.”

“I work on the web gaming side of things,” McAnlis said, mentioning the recent boom of technologies that allow web games to get very interactive, offer great graphics. As it all happening in the browser, there is no download, no installation, the games are very social, they run everywhere. “You click a link, you share it, it works.”

Addressing developer expectations for Google Chrome

Asked about his upcoming presentation at the Velocity conference, McAnlis said it would focus on GPU implementation in rendering web page, the pros and cons of using this approach in Chrome, on how to use CSS tags the right way, to make pages that are fast and user responsive.

Where the most common caveats for developers are concerned, McAnlis mentioned the aspect of performance, which is actually made up of network, render, and compute performance. “Each pillar requires to solve a problem a certain way.” Another issue for developers to focus is their use of memory with JavaScript operations.

Mobile “is one of the big competing points with developers,” McAnlis said. “Mobile performance hasn’t been where it needs to be, but it has to get better.” Right now, tons of websites ask you to install native apps when accessed via mobile, the reason being the better performance developers get with native. Technologies are however changing the landscape, one of them being Chrome getting into mobile. As performance is getting better, websites will get rid of native apps and come back to browsers.

McAnlis also said that, performance-wise, the community is not focusing on emerging markets. There are 5 billion people expected to come online soon, most from low connectivity areas. Developers have to “look at all of their regions and optimize differently,” it’s all about connectivity speed. “The web is forcing us to think like a global developer,” McAnlis said.

Diverse developer culture

Asked what he found most exciting about the Velocity conference, he mentioned the large number of people “taking their own twist on cloud. It is interesting to see so many different takes on the same architecture.” Such diversity shows “we’re not done yet.” With so much competition, different ideas, “man, that’s just fuel for awesome,” he said.

As far as future trends are concerned, McAnlis said that over the next 12 months there will be “a lot more discussion about client-side performance ramification,” while the current focus is on the network right now. As cloud issues get easier to deal with, the next big challenge for developers will be client side mobile web performance.