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

​Labs guide

The 5G era has already become a hot topic for everyone. In addition, 5G can also drive autonomous driving, Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, Industrial Internet, artificial intelligence, smart home, smart city and other industries, which will develop rapidly. The impact of 5G on the IT industry is the first to bear the brunt, so for Web front-end development, what impact will the arrival of the 5G era have?

Part 01 Boundary of 5G & Web front-end

1.1 Comprehensively promote the front-end development boundary

The network upgrades of all dynasties are revolutionary changes. 2G and 3G opened the era of mobile Internet, and 4G brought the mobile Internet into a period of rapid development. With greater bandwidth and speed, mobile phones are fully intelligent, making mobile Internet related to Every aspect of life, and become stronger. Seconds on, low latency, online high-definition video is no longer a problem. Understanding the meaning of 5G is not only about faster network speeds, but the real theme of 5G is the Internet of Everything.

The Internet of Things has developed in the 4G era, but limited by issues such as network connection speed, hardware performance, and battery power consumption, Wi-Fi is basically still used as the access point. In the 5G era, no matter in terms of bandwidth or network speed, it will expand geometrically, so that tasks and items around us can be connected to the network. Fields such as Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Things, autonomous driving, and neural networks have very high demand for data bandwidth. 5G technology will become an accelerator in these fields, making all this possible and greatly accelerating the development process of related fields. At that time, with the emergence of various vehicle-mounted devices, wearable devices, voice interaction terminals, AR / MR devices..., we will see many new ways of human-computer interaction. At this time, the web, as the carrier of information content, 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. From the front-end figure, these are the visible directions of 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, refer to the emergence of frameworks such as vue and react in the 4G era. 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 are user-oriented.

I personally think that in the 5G era, the web front-end will have better user experience requirements. In the past, many bottlenecks restricted by network speed and bandwidth will be broken through. 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 consider the development cost and make a lot of technical optimization work to improve the speed and user experience. With the blessing of the 5G environment and high-performance hardware, these will no longer be a problem, and more capacity, space and time will be used for better experience. At a network speed of several or even dozens of M, it can be opened at the millisecond level, and the user experience will be improved by an order of magnitude. It will also release more technical restrictions on the front end, call more system APIs, and give more possibilities, such as based on For AR applications on the Web, you can consider the more gorgeous interface, 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 meet 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, Internet of Things platform, artificial intelligence platform and security platform have appeared in the industry market one after another. The 5G era is also called 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 companies 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 mid-stage development environment of PC or mobile technology, but also develop for a wider range of platforms. Therefore, they need to have a sufficient understanding of the basic knowledge of each platform and their business, and have a higher level of personal comprehensive skills. Require.

1.4 Significant improvement in R&D efficiency

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

1. A set of code multiplexing, more efficient release process, and platform consistency.

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

Page visualization building product development classification

For example, Taobao's imgcook aims to generate code directly from (design drafts, prototypes, PRD, APIHub, CodeHub and other resources) through intelligent means.

Imgcook's product operation process diagram

3. Improve the efficiency of the intelligent industry, realize the intelligentization, visualization, standardized management and collaboration of the product production process, and the integration of cross-domain integration to achieve efficient production, improve efficiency and reduce costs. For example, in the financial industry, in smart banking outlets, the proportion of operating counter personnel decreased by 15%; after the transformation, the interdisciplinary talents increased to 90%; tellers, further reducing costs.

Under the above premise, code personnel will be relatively reduced, and positions that promote business logic configuration work content will be born, that is, the computer can do what the computer can do, and the personnel will be liberated to product configuration design, product experience improvement, etc. In this way, it will bring about higher product quality improvement and business enhancement.

Part 02 Summary

The 5G era will further improve the complexity, experience, and scenarios of web pages. Just like the era from 2G to 4G, from text to full-picture video, 5G will revolutionize web pages enormously, but it will not happen overnight. The technical ecological environment of 5G is still in its infancy - supporting facilities need to be gradually improved, and hardware performance and browser processing speed still need a leap-forward transformation. In the era of the Internet of Everything, the web will usher in more diverse scenarios than 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 products better in business from now on.

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

3. Constantly update our technology stack, broaden our technical horizons, and horizontally dismantle applications in terms of technical responsibilities.