Author｜ Wang Shuyan, Wang Jiarong, unit: China Mobile Smart Home Operation Center

​Labs Guide

The 5G era has already become a hot topic of "after dinner". In addition, 5G can also drive industries such as autonomous driving, Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, Industrial Internet, artificial intelligence, smart homes, and smart cities, which will develop rapidly. The impact of 5G on the IT industry is the first to bear the brunt, so what impact will the arrival of the 5G era have on web front-end development?

Part 01 Boundary of 5G&Web Front End

1.1 Fully push the front-end development boundaries

The network upgrades in all dynasties have been revolutionary changes. 2G and 3G have opened the era of mobile Internet, and 4G has brought the mobile Internet into a period of rapid development. With greater bandwidth and speed, mobile phones have become intelligent in an all-round way. every aspect of life and become stronger. Open in seconds, low latency, online high-definition video is no longer a problem. And understanding the significance of 5G is not only about faster network speed, but the real theme of 5G is the Internet of Everything.

The Internet of Things has developed in the 4G era, but limited by problems such as network connection rate, hardware performance, battery power consumption, etc., basically wifi is used as the access point. In the 5G era, both in terms of bandwidth and network speed, it is an upward expansion of geometric multiples, so that the task items around us can be connected to the network. The fields of the Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Things, autonomous driving, and neural networks have very high demands on data bandwidth. 5G technology will become an accelerator in these fields, making all this possible and greatly accelerating the development of related fields. At that time, with the emergence of various in-vehicle devices, wearable devices, voice interactive terminals, AR / MR devices, etc., we will see many new ways of human-computer interaction. At this time, as the carrier of information content, the web will apply a large amount of multimedia content to front-end development.

Internet technology and reality

The expansion of more scenarios is based on the development of the client. As an important part of the client, the web will inevitably usher in new content, and front-end development will also fully enter these fields. Different from the traditional consumer Internet, the front-end design and development of the Internet of Things will be more closely integrated with specific application scenarios. We may not only develop on PCs and mobile phones, but also in vehicles, voice control, and holographic images. To the front-end figure, these are the directions of visible future development. At the same time, the requirements for stability are also higher, which is not a small challenge for web front-end developers. In terms of technology, referring to the 4G era, the generation of frameworks such as vue and react, also in the 5G environment, the development and coding technology has also undergone revolutionary changes, expanding to a broader boundary --- such as low-code platforms, front-end serverless , and webIDE, etc.

1.2 Improvement of experience and interaction

Technology serves products, and products face users.

I personally think that in the 5G era, the web front-end will have better user experience requirements. In the past, many bottlenecks limited by network speed and bandwidth will be broken through. For example, in the 4G environment, our general web applications of portal websites or apps will load on the first screen. The speed is about 1.5s, and only some excellent ones can be less than 0.5s. Therefore, in order to reduce the rendering speed of the first screen, we need to make a lot of technical optimization work to improve the speed and user experience while considering the development cost. With the support of the 5G environment and high-performance hardware, these will no longer be a problem, and more capacity, space and time will be applied to a better experience. Imagine that the web page of a general App is in ten Under the network speed of several or even tens of M, it can be opened in milliseconds, and the user experience will be improved by an order of magnitude. It will also release more technical limitations on the front end, call more system APIs, and give more possibilities, such as based on For web AR applications, you can consider the more gorgeous interfaces, image acquisition, feature point extraction, image matching, and animation rendering in virtual reality products such as web AR. At present, Web AR is still in the embryonic state of technology. Network support, browser (or hardware) computing power, equipment energy consumption, ecological environment, etc. do not yet have certain conditions. I believe that in the near future, these will not become a problem. .

1.3 The dependence of development on the platform will become more and more obvious

A series of platforms such as big data platform, cloud computing platform, IoT platform, artificial intelligence platform and security platform have appeared in the industry market one after another. The 5G era is also known as the "Internet of Things era" and "Platform era". Enterprises can greatly reduce the technical threshold of 5G through the platform, so as to build their own ecology, which is an important foundation for technology enterprises to maintain rapid development. For front-end developers, different platforms will be used for different scenarios, and they will face different technical environments and technical requirements. Developers are not only in the technical middle-stage development environment of PC or mobile terminal, but develop for a wider range of platforms. Therefore, they need to have a solid understanding of the basic knowledge of each platform and its business, and have a higher level of personal comprehensive skills. Require.

1.4 Significant improvement in R&D efficiency

The 5G mentioned above will widen the front-end development boundary and develop on multiple platforms, so cross-platform and cross-end development solutions will also emerge as the times require:

1. A set of code multi-terminal reuse, more efficient release process, and platform consistency.

2. The visual construction of the page, the product development is listed as: low code, no code, auto code, intelligent one-click code generation, the upgrade of front-end web development will also be more challenging, and it will also bring huge benefits to the front-end. income.

Page visualization build product development classification

For example, Taobao's imgcook, the goal is to generate code directly from (design draft, prototype draft, PRD, APIHub, CodeHub and other resources) through intelligent means.

Diagram of the product running process of imgcook

3. Improve the efficiency of the intelligent industry, realize the intelligent, visual, standardized management and collaboration of the product production process, and integrate and integrate across fields, so as to achieve efficient production, improve efficiency and reduce costs. For example, in the financial industry, in smart banking outlets, the proportion of operational counter personnel has dropped by 15%; the number of compound talents after the transformation has increased to 90%; after the addition of super counter machines, self-service foreign exchange purchase machines, and virtual teller machines, the area of ​​outlets and the reduction of teller, further reducing costs.

Under the above premise, the number of code personnel will be relatively reduced, and jobs that promote the configuration work content of business logic will be born, that is, the things that the computer can do are handed over to the computer, and the personnel will be liberated to the aspects of product configuration design, product experience improvement, etc. This will lead to higher product quality improvement and business enhancement.

Part 02 Summary

The 5G era will further enhance the complexity, experience, and scenarios of web pages. Just like the era from 2G to 4G, from text to full-picture video, 5G will bring huge changes to pages, but it will not happen overnight. The technical ecological environment of 5G is still in its infancy—the supporting facilities need to be gradually improved, and the hardware performance and browser processing speed also need a dramatic improvement. In the era of the Internet of Everything, the web will usher in more diverse scenarios that are different from smartphones and PCs, and will enter more vertical fields, so what can we do?

1. Interactive experience, user experience will be the theme of product development, and we should start thinking about how to make the user experience of the product better in the business.

2. Pay attention to and explore 3D and multi-terminal pan-screen business scenarios. In the future, browsers may develop unexpectedly powerful, and even realize 3D projection visualization.

3. Continuously update our technology stack, broaden our technical horizons, and conduct horizontal dismantling of applications in terms of technical responsibilities.