"Web Platform" entries

Signals from the O’Reilly Fluent Conference 2015

From user-centric performance to cognitive resources, here are key insights from the O’Reilly Fluent Conference.

Experts from across the Web development world came together in San Francisco this week for the O’Reilly Fluent Conference 2015. Below we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.

User-centric performance metrics

Paul Irish, PM at Google Chrome, says it’s important to look at performance the right way. Rather than ask “what is slow,” instead focus on “what does the user feel?” Irish outlines four phases of interaction and what users expect to experience. “Focus on the user,” he says, “and all else will follow.”

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4 things that happened in PHP while you weren’t looking

PHP gains some modern features as it heads to a 7.0 release.

Image: CC BY 2.0 Chris Lott https://www.flickr.com/photos/fncll/ via Flickr

I think most programmers have come into contact with PHP at some point, editing a WordPress plugin or getting PHPMyAdmin running on a server. We think we know what PHP is, but the language has been very quietly growing up over the last few years, so here’s some headlines that you might have missed.

Upgrading is easy

PHP has always had frequent patch releases, but now its minor releases are approximately annual. This means that the differences between the versions, and therefore the painful experiences of an upgrade, are much reduced. It also means that there’s probably a relatively new version available at the time when a distro is rolling its new release.

PHP has also developed much greater consideration for its users when upgrading. From PHP 5.3 there is an error_reporting level, E_DEPRECATED, which will log any features you are using which will be removed in the next version of PHP. Nothing gets removed in a minor version that wasn’t already planned to be removed before the release of the previous minor version — so fewer surprises for those of us in userland.

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Power of the platforms

Uncertainty is a feature, not a bug.

Image: CC BY 2.0 NASA's Earth Observatory via Wikimedia Commons  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southern_Lights.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Southern_Lights.jpg

After decades of work on programming, we finally got a development environment with massive reach and tremendous power. Somehow, though, the web isn’t centered on a comprehensive programming environment. The web succeeded with a (severely) lowest-common denominator, specification-driven approach that let it grow with time, technology, and multiple communities, across multiple platforms.

Almost two decades ago, I was all excited about Java. Write applets once, run anywhere, with libraries to make sure it all came out the same wherever anywhere might be. Java is still a powerhouse, but it all worked out differently than I expected. Even in Java’s early years, before the Java news was filled with security bulletins, applets felt like a strange mix with their surrounding web pages. Creating an applet demanded programmers to build every detail. Even with Java’s ever-improving libraries, creating a Java applet that did much was an intense experience focused on programming.

Java wasn’t the only comprehensive way to build web apps, of course. Flash demanded programming, but its values always incorporated design, action, and well, flash, in ways that meshed well with the way people built sites. Flash kept growing and growing before its ecosystem took a fatal hit from the iPhone as HTML5 offered replacements for some of its key strengths. I mostly notice Flash these days because it asks me to update it regularly and because pages tell me when it’s crashed.

Compared to either of those rich environments, web technology is a tangled mess. The early web was functional but unstyled, with no behavior beyond navigating among pages. That? That would dominate client-side computing? Read more…

Please nominate for the web platform awards

Recognizing the people who've built the Web

This March, we’ll be announcing the Web Platform Awards at the O’Reilly Fluent Conference. Fluent is all about JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, and the best practices that make up the Web Platform, and we’d like to recognize the people who’ve made it the powerful ecosystem it is today.

The description is pretty simple, but I think includes a huge number of potentially great awardees:

The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and the supporting Web ecosystem.

We hope to hear about many ways people have “demonstrated exceptional leadership”. It may be standards, it may be coding, it may be explaining, it may be community, or it may well be something I haven’t thought of yet. What matters is that you can tell us why you think they should get an award.

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