Analyst George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, caught up with Nathan Schloss, software engineer at Facebook, during the @Scale conference to discuss some of the company’s pioneering practices that will ultimately migrate down to other mobile web companies.

Schloss, who works on the notifications team, discussed a new paradigm called JavaScript service workers. “These are basically pieces of code that exist outside the web page that persist like native code would persist,” he said. “So you can do a lot of interesting things.”

He went on to explain: “They act like a client-side proxy, so a lot of the performance benefits you would get from a native app by having data on the app, you can get from the JavaScript service worker. You also get push notifications and other benefits of having native code. If you’re deciding whether to build an app, if you already have a lot of skilled web developers, a good solution can be to use JavaScript service worker and take advantage of native features without learning a whole new skill set.”

Schloss said that the technology didn’t exist when Facebook initially built its mobile apps.

The barrier of entry, lower with mobile web applications, is one of the distinguishing characteristics between that technology and native applications. “People generally have web stacks,” Schloss said. “People generally have developers who know how to develop for the web. But you can do a lot more with a native app. There’s still somewhat of a tradeoff, and we’ll see how a lot of this plays out.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of @Scale 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE