Empowering dream makers in the intelligent era: the breakthrough and establishment of Huawei’s terminal distributed technology

[51CTO.com original article] Many people compare developers to "dream makers" because through the efforts of developers, many innovative applications have "turned dreams into reality", bringing consumers unprecedented shocking experiences. But we must admit that consumers' appetites are becoming more and more "sophisticated": Can you play your favorite songs on the car screen by making a gesture while driving? Can photos on your phone fly to your computer in an instant? Can a wearable sports camera become the third camera on your phone? Can mobile games be synchronized to a high-definition TV in real time?

The ideal is perfect, but the reality behind the layers of barriers is even more "skinny". With more and more interactive methods and richer application scenarios, the difficulty of development has increased exponentially. Especially for cross-terminal development, in order to adapt to different terminals and different systems, developers have to do a lot of repeated development and multi-form development. At the same time, in order to seize the market opportunity, the innovation cycle of its R&D is also constantly shortened. Many developers sighed "it's too difficult"!

Three major challenges in cross-terminal development

In fact, as early as a few years ago, many developers began to think about cross-terminal development: Can one device have the functions of all the products at hand, so as to break through the limitations of different terminal hardware and enable independent smart devices to sense and cooperate with each other? This idea is not a fantasy, but it must first overcome three major obstacles:

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First, it is too difficult to adapt a large number of terminal hardware products. Mobile phones, smart watches, Bluetooth speakers, smart homes, high-definition TVs, and other terminal hardware have different forms. Even if developers only develop a certain function in an application, they need to adapt hundreds or thousands of different hardware products. The workload is huge and many of the tasks are repeated, which is inefficient.

Secondly, the system architecture is complicated, and different platforms require the use of multiple different programming languages. Moreover, different platforms have different databases, and cross-platform data integration is extremely difficult;

Finally, due to the lack of innovation and application ecology, when encountering a cross-scenario hot spot, there are often many followers, but the innovation strength is greatly reduced, and the corresponding part that wants to be implemented and provided to users is even smaller.

Obviously, it is irrational to recreate every component from hardware to software to ensure the application effect of each terminal, which will also cause developers and enterprises to lose development opportunities. So how to "break" the cross-terminal development dilemma? In Huawei's eyes, these problems may not really be problems.

Huawei's Distributed Development Technology Breakthrough

In the face of cross-terminal development, Huawei's terminal distributed technology mainly does three things, and based on this, it breaks the barriers to cross-terminal development: first, virtualize all hardware resources into a hardware pool so that hardware resources can call each other; second, make the software system modular, call on demand and deploy flexibly; third, develop once and deploy on multiple terminals to reduce the workload of developers.

Huawei's terminal distributed technology has been upgraded again on the original basis, integrating more cross-terminal development capabilities. In short, it has reduced the difficulty of cross-terminal development again, allowing developers to quickly obtain a variety of cross-terminal capabilities. Taking Huawei's terminal distributed technology tool chain HUAWEI DevEco Studio as an example, it integrates dozens of Huawei's capabilities. For example, the most headache-inducing problem for developers is to reinvent the wheel. In DevEco Studio, you can drag and drop to generate API code with one click, and you can automatically introduce Gradle packages and automatically generate header imports, which makes development efficiency very high.

In order to improve development efficiency, Huawei has also opened up different cross-terminal capabilities in the form of interfaces: if social communication is needed, the easy access of Huawei's CaaS Kit can turn the application into a video call artifact in seconds; file transfer between different terminals is slow and unstable? Share Kit allows high-speed wireless transmission without packet loss; there are too many large-screen and small-screen terminal devices, and Cast+ Kit makes multi-screen collaboration as smooth as silk; developers who want to try connection methods other than Bluetooth and WiFi can choose OneHop Kit, which can achieve multi-device touch interaction with a light touch; if developers lack confidence in edge-cloud collaboration, LinkTurbo Kit can continuously accelerate Huawei's cloud collaboration network; developers who want to build a super terminal must not miss DeviceVirtualization Kit to virtualize hardware devices.

Let's take HUAWEI Cast+Kit as an example to see how Huawei helps developers resolve the pressure of multi-screen switching. In the past, when developers switched applications from small screens to large screens, they needed to consider many factors: the convenience of cross-screen operation, screen synchronization effect, low network latency, application stability, etc. Huawei's distributed technology Cast+Kit's black technology easily resolves these problems: Huawei's self-developed audio and video synchronization protocol, dynamic high frame rate solution and perceptual coding algorithm achieve an ultra-low latency of 50ms for screen casting, which is stable and smooth, so developers don't have to worry about the user experience across screens; 500ms Huawei protocol end-to-end connection speed supports the simplest second discovery and second connection; Huawei's ultra-simple communication mechanism cooperates with the wireless underlying protocol and algorithm optimization, even if the network packet loss rate is as high as 25%, it can still ensure smooth and stable video playback.

The most important point is that the access method of Cast+Kit is very friendly to developers. The software framework is concise and easy to use. In addition, Cast+Kit has achieved a high degree of technical integration and packaging on Huawei's side. Developers only need to call simple interfaces to integrate and achieve rapid development. In other words, Huawei leaves the complexity to itself and the simplicity to developers.

Establishment of a full-scenario smart ecological service platform

What is the purpose of Huawei opening up so many capabilities? The most direct purpose is to break down the barriers between terminal hardware and single devices, so that hardware is no longer a limitation, and there is an opportunity to create a "super terminal" with unlimited boundaries in the future. Some developers with a keen sense of smell may see more profoundly, rushing on the road of "Internet of Everything". Huawei's distributed terminals are building a platform to work with developers to jointly lay out the pan-terminal ecosystem in the IOT era.

In the era of the Internet of Everything, mobile phones will not be the only entrance for people to access smart life. Auxiliary entrances such as watches, headphones, PCs, tablets, speakers, glasses, car computers and smart screens will also jointly undertake smart life scenarios such as smart home, mobile office, smart travel, sports and health, audio and video entertainment, etc. Based on this trend, breaking down the barriers between different smart terminal devices is an inevitable choice. If developers want to make great achievements in the era of the Internet of Everything, and if corporate users also want to have stronger competitiveness and vitality in the era of the Internet of Everything, then from now on, they need to improve their capabilities in the field of cross-terminal development.

Distributed technology is a key technology in the era of the Internet of Everything, and it is also an important basic technology for realizing people's smart life. The emergence of Huawei's terminal Su means that Huawei has created a strong technical support platform for developers and third-party companies, a partner with a wealth of smart terminals, and a strong market base of more than 650 million terminal users. And under the influence of Huawei's 1+8+N strategy, with smartphones as the center and radiating to the ecosystem of surrounding smart devices, developers are a vital link and a key factor in whether this ecosystem is vibrant. Therefore, it is not difficult for us to understand why Huawei's distributed technology has chosen to continue to open up and continuously empower developers.

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