Developers at Google Inc. are rethinking the standard client-server model in rendering applications. Apps might better serve individual web browsers or entities like Facebook Inc. or Twitter Inc. depending on which side they fall, according to Stephen Fluin (pictured), developer advocate at Google.

“There’s a lot of consumers of content that we don’t necessarily think about when we’re building applications,” Fluin said. For example, there are computers that are processing the web across the internet. Obviously, these include search engines like Google and Bing, but also social data aggregators like Facebook and Twitter. They are scraping websites looking for metadata, thumbnails and all sorts of content, Fluin explained.

This is one reason why Google’s AngularJS development team, to which Fluin belongs, is branching out from its client focus. (AngularJS extends HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, vocabulary for applications.) The team has typically developed to optimize applications for the client or web server side, Fluin told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Node Summit in San Francisco, California. 

Running code as close as possible to the browser can produce rich, engaging experiences for users, Fluin stated. 

Reflipping client-server coin

A more recent preoccupation within the Angular community is: “How do we write JavaScript and TypeScript [programming languages] in a way that you can run it on the client or the server?” Fluin said.

Just last week, new Angular command-line-interface changes took effect to make client-server switching easier. “You can run your applications on the server and then bootstrap a client side application on top of that,” Fluin said.

Running applications on the server is not just Google’s plan to make its own (and other data frackers‘) job easier, according to Fluin. There are sometimes benefits to individual web browsers too. “You can actually have an increased perception of your load time, so things look like they’re loading faster,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Node Summit 2017.

Photo: SiliconANGLE