Weekly news roundup: .NET, JQuery, HTML

Whether you’re a professional developer, a hobbyist or a student, regularly keeping up to date with events in the development world is crucial for understanding larger trends. These recent announcements. in particular, point towards considerable changes in policy and strategy around coding for different browsers and platforms.

While not everything that’s happened over the last few weeks will directly affect all developers, the week’s news roundup does tell us about some longer term trends in .NET, jQuery and HTML which are likely to have an impact on the industry. The results of these changes might not be felt instantly, but they do represent global shifts which, sooner or later, will come to play an important role in web and app development.

What these announcements really indicate is that change is something which development professionals must adapt to constantly. Whether they come from big players in the industry or the open source community, they all contribute to pushing development forward in different ways. For those who want to be prepared, it’s good to see the bigger picture and have an idea of the changes that are coming their way.

 

1. HTML5: Flash gone in a flash

Only a few years ago (2010 to be more precise), Adobe Flash Player dominated the internet video market; a good 75% or more of online video were supported by the tool. However, for a generation now used to the plugin and its updates, a collective sigh of relief is bound to be exhaled since YouTube recently announced that HTML5 would replace it as the video sharing website’s primary platform for media delivery.

Flash, for all its strengths, could be a real pain to use and worked fairly poorly on devices too. Anyone who has attempted to watch videos of cute kittens on their phones would, no doubt, have encountered its painful slowness and battery drain.

Flash had its day for two reasons. First, it was a tool designed for the PC era, when people interacted with video through desktops and with mice. Downloading the plugin to watch video was fine then, but as the way people interacted with websites moved forward, Flash got left behind, unable to release anything which could keep up with the pace of change in technology.

At the same time, HTML5 has been growing rapidly to provide the framework for the modern internet, facilitating video and other media in a one-code-fits-all approach. As a result, Flash has effectively been made redundant, with new technologies offering everything it did and more (and doing it better). HTML5 looks set to dominate the Internet in the coming years and although this might be a bad day for Adobe, for users it will mean smoother streaming, less buffering and a more integrated experience.

 

2. .NET: Speaking of world domination…

Under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft have opened up a number of their developments to the Open Source community. While it’s been pointed out that the corporation have probably been working towards this strategy for a number of years, Nadella has really pushed the move forward. Some commentators have questioned Microsoft’s intentions here - are they really encouraging internet democracy or is this all about reaching a situation where Microsoft products are used to write, well, everything?

Whatever your take on this trend, this month saw them open source the .NET engine CoreCLR. They recently published the source code for the CoreCLR on GitHub as well as other.NET runtime components. CoreCLR is used for functional tasks such as compilation of machine code or garbaging. Not the most exciting, perhaps, but undeniably important as part of the wider goal of interoperability. This can be seen as just another step towards providing a universal coding language which will write for Windows as well as all major competitors.

 

3. jQuery: Open Source adoptions

While others might be finding ways to dominate the market, things seem somewhat less aggressive over at jQuery. Following three years of oversight from software craftsmanship guru Ariya Hidayat, jQuery announced they would be bringing the Esprima project, the popular JavaScript parser, into the family. The aim has been to make the project more widely available and encourage the contribution of the wider community.

Along with the adoption of Esprima, jQuery also announced they would be releasing a version 2.0 of the parser. The new release introduces many of the features which have been involved in the experimental “harmony” branch of ECMAScript 2015 (also known as ES6) including code coverage analysis, style checkers and linters.

 

What does all this mean for you?

Whether these changes will radically alter your job or not, being aware of these trends tells us a lot about the way things are going in the development community. Trends like the expansion of HTML5, an increasingly open-sourced model from Microsoft and the gradual expansion of jQuery all offer exciting opportunities and challenges which will, no doubt, impact on development over the coming months and years.