Thinking about the Boundary Expansion of Web Front-end in the 5G Era

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

Labs Guide

The 5G era has long become a hot topic for everyone. In addition, 5G can also drive the rapid development of industries such as autonomous driving, the Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, Industrial Internet, artificial intelligence, smart homes, and smart cities. The impact of 5G on the IT industry is the first to be affected. So what impact will the arrival of the 5G era have on Web front-end development?

Part 01 The Boundary of 5G&Web Frontend

1.1 Comprehensively push the boundaries of front-end development

The upgrades of the network in each generation have been revolutionary changes. 2G and 3G 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 are becoming more intelligent, making the mobile Internet involved in all aspects of life and becoming more powerful. Opening in seconds, low latency, and online high-definition video are no longer a problem. To understand the significance of 5G, it is not just about faster network speeds, but the real theme of 5G is the interconnection of all things.

The Internet of Things has developed in the 4G era, but it is still basically based on wifi access points due to network connection speed issues, hardware performance, battery power consumption and other issues. In the 5G era, both bandwidth and network speed will be expanded exponentially, so that the tasks and objects around us can be connected to the network. The fields of Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Things, autonomous driving, and neural networks have very high demands for data bandwidth. 5G technology will become an accelerator in these fields, making all this possible and greatly accelerating the development of related fields. By then, 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, web, as a carrier of information content, will apply a large amount of multimedia content to front-end development.

The connection between Internet technology and reality

The expansion of more scenarios is based on client development. 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. Unlike the traditional consumer Internet, the front-end design and development in the field 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. These are all visible future development directions. At the same time, the requirements for stability are also higher, which is a big challenge for web front-end developers. In terms of technology, referring to the emergence of frameworks such as vue and react in the 4G era, the development coding technology has also undergone revolutionary changes in the 5G environment, expanding to a wider boundary-such as low-code platforms, front-end serverless, and webIDE.

1.2 Improvement of experience and interaction

Technology serves products, and products serve users.

I personally think that in the 5G era, the web front-end will have better requirements for user experience. Many bottlenecks that were previously restricted by network speed and bandwidth will be broken. For example, in the 4G environment, the first screen loading speed of our general portal websites or app web applications is about 1.5s, and only some extremely excellent ones can be less than 0.5s. Therefore, in order to reduce the first screen rendering speed, we need to consider the development cost and make a lot of technical optimization work to improve the speed and user experience. With the support of 5G environment and high-performance hardware, these will no longer be a problem. There will be more capacity, space and time for better experience. Imagine that a general App web page can be opened in milliseconds at a network speed of more than ten or even dozens of M. The user experience will be greatly improved, and more technical restrictions on the front end will be released, more system APIs will be called, and more possibilities will be given. For example, for Web-based AR applications, 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. Currently, Web AR is still in its infancy. Network support, browser (or hardware) computing power, device energy consumption, ecological environment, etc. do not yet meet certain conditions. I believe that in the near future, these will not be a problem.

1.3 Development will become more and more dependent on the platform

A series of platforms such as big data platforms, cloud computing platforms, Internet of Things platforms, artificial intelligence platforms and security platforms have appeared in the industry market. The 5G era is also called the "Internet of Things era" and the "platform era". The platform has the ability to integrate resources. Enterprises can significantly reduce the technical threshold of 5G through the platform, thereby building their own ecology. This is an important foundation for technology companies to maintain rapid development. For front-end developers, different platforms will be used for different scenarios, facing different technical environments and technical requirements. Developers are not only in the technical middle-end development environment of PC or mobile terminals, but are developing for a wider range of platforms. Therefore, they need to have a sufficient understanding of the basic knowledge and business of each platform, and have higher requirements for personal comprehensive skills.

1.4 Significant improvement in R&D efficiency

As mentioned above, 5G will expand the boundaries of front-end development and enable development on multiple platforms, so cross-platform and cross-end development solutions will also emerge:

1. One set of code can be reused on multiple terminals, with more efficient release process and platform consistency.

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

Page visualization construction product development classification

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

imgcook product operation flow chart

3. Improve efficiency in intelligent industries, realize intelligent, visualized, standardized management collaboration in the product production process, and cross-domain integration, so as to achieve efficient production, improve efficiency and reduce costs. For example, in the financial industry, in intelligent bank outlets, the proportion of operational counter personnel has decreased by 15%; after the transformation, the number of compound talents has increased to 90%; after the addition of super counter machines, self-service foreign exchange machines, and virtual teller machines, the area of ​​outlets and tellers have been reduced, further reducing costs.

Under the above premise, the number of code personnel will be relatively reduced, and positions that promote the configuration of business logic will be created. That is, computers will be allowed to do what they can do, freeing up personnel to focus on product configuration design, product experience improvement, etc., which will bring about 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 transition from 2G to 4G, and from text to full-image video, the transformation of 5G to web pages will be huge, but it will not happen overnight. The technical ecosystem of 5G is still in its infancy. The supporting facilities need to be gradually improved, and the hardware performance and browser processing speed need a leap forward. 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. We should start thinking about how to make the user experience of products better in business.

2. Pay attention to and explore 3D and multi-terminal pan-screen business scenarios. Browsers may become unexpectedly powerful in the future and may even achieve 3D projection visualization.

3. Continuously update our technology stack, broaden our technical vision, and horizontally break down applications in terms of technical responsibilities.