Trend: HTML5 as then next emerging standard
Title: how mobile Facebook was designed to write once and run anywhere.
Comment: The most downloaded app of all time.. Written by Facebook in Html5. AND how not to write an app 5 times!
Ps.. The answer is to wrap web app inside the native app!
Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobile-was-design.php
Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing from feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then have grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to now the precipice of HTML5. Facebook's creed, or really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once and run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.
Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Zetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got to the point it is at now and how it is going to iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?
What is below is a direct transcript with photos from Fetterman's f8 presentation. A few things to note:
Facebook mobile has its backbone in its mobile website. Everything that is built into the native applications actually comes from the mobile Web. Think of the way PhoneGap wraps a browser-based website and that is how Facebook approached the problem. And then some.
HTML5 is the future. The fourth page gets into how all of this history is leading Facebook to a precipice of change with HTML5 and the so-called Project Spartan.
Also note that Fetterman talks fast and occasionally swears. He is the classic Facebook engineer: kind of young, pretty brash and supremely confident. The transcript is as true to his actual words as possible.
