 in San Francisco, California. It's the day two of the CUBE, SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of the O'Reilly Media Fluent Conference. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by Jeff Frick, my co-host today. And our next guest is Eric Elliott, JavaScript author of programming JavaScript applications. We're also works at Adobe Systems. Welcome to the CUBE. Thanks. Glad to be here. So, obviously, we had just said, Roger McGullis on his site a couple of years ago. He said, oh, JavaScript's gonna be really, really important. Good call. I mean, JavaScript isn't going anywhere. No. We only have a bright future. It has some baggage. It has some legacy. But it has a big opportunity and big promise. So first, I want to get your take being the author on the web app side here at Fluent. What's your take on the current situation? Obviously, JavaScript's getting, you know, obviously it's there, it's validated, but it's got a lot more headroom and a lot more things to do. What is the roadmap look like to you? Well, I think where we're coming from is really an interesting trajectory. I think just a couple of years ago, things were stabilizing a little bit, and then suddenly, everybody started doing all kinds of crazy things with modules and AMD, and then that kind of shook a lot of things up. And I think that we're trying to get a lot of that standardized into the specifications, so there aren't all these competing formats anymore. And I think that that standardization effort is really important, and I'm excited to see that happening. So I'm really excited about that. I'm also really excited about just the added capabilities, especially on mobile, WebGL, that kind of stuff. I think all of that is really terrific for JavaScript because once we go there, there's no place we can't go, right? So JavaScript has always been looked at as, you know, a web format. I'll say build a web page, web design, and then obviously now it's evolved into a full-blown software engineering industry, right? You have a lot of serious developers now, as well as newbies coming into the fold. What's happening? I mean, obviously we're hearing a lot of tooling going on. You're just looking at people talking about standards, WebSoc, it's a conversation we're hearing more and more about not much here, but, you know, we got Node.js. You're seeing a lot more things happening. Server, you know, getting into the server side, getting into the database side. Did this catch you off guard? Did you see this coming? What was your take on this migration and creating a stack around it? So first, I think that some of the things that caught me off guard that I wasn't expecting was just how much tooling we're capable of doing with JavaScript. For instance, I've been told for years and years that we just can't do the really cool tooling without the static types and things like that in other languages. And then along comes Turn.js. And suddenly our editors are able to give us some deep insights about what is going on in our code. And that was unexpected for me. I was like, you know, I just thought we'd have to rely on our unit tests and think and, you know, just trace through the code and figure out what's going on. But now we have really good ability to track where variables are coming from, how they flow through the programs. So I think that surprised me. The advancements in Chrome's dev tools are just stunning, really amazing. So I think that is really encouraging. There's a project called Brackets that Adobe is working on. And they've got some really cool things going on with that. And I can't wait for that stuff to stabilize. It's an open source editor that's really nice. So I think as far as tooling is concerned, things have gone really, really well. I didn't expect that. And the rest API, so let's talk about standardization. That's something that everyone's been talking about in wants, right? So it's kind of a breath of fresh air there. But, you know, the API and the rest APIs is a huge breath of fresh air. Now you have some standardizations, at least an API kind of model going on. Is that, do you feel the same way about that? I really do. In fact, there was a really encouraging talk here, I think yesterday, specifically about that. How to create better, restful APIs that are more restful, where you can really discover, the API is more self-documenting. You can discover links to other API resources. And I think that that's a really great thing. And the hyper-media aspect of that, I think it's really gonna change things. Expansion, but that's positive. But I wanna ask you about something that I'm hearing a lot about here, AngularJS. What's going on with that? How does that fit into the picture here? I think I'm the wrong person to ask about Angular. I actually don't have a lot of experience with it myself. What's the buzz? I mean, I don't know much about it at all. So the buzz is that it can do a lot of things for you. It makes a lot of decisions for you, which means that you don't have to necessarily implement everything yourself, which is not the case with things like Backbone, where Backbone just gives you these basic methods of separating concerns, and then you're expected to do everything else, and wire everything up. Whereas, Angular, you mix some stuff into your tags, and it wires up your data bindings for you, and does a lot of magic behind the scenes, which means that you write less code. At least that's the... And theory. That's the theory, that's the hope. That's the dream. Yeah, that's the dream. And I think they're doing cool things, and I hope that we can take some of those cool things and apply them in other areas. So I wish them all the best. I'm not using it myself, but hopefully I'll get to play with it a little bit more in the future. Eric, talk a little bit, you're at Adobe now, right? And I used to, before it was Creative Suite, got my page maker and all those things, and boxes full of disks, and then we got boxes full of CDs, and recently Adobe announced they're not shipping boxes of anything for Creative Suite. What's kind of the vibe there? I mean, is the power of the online tools now such that they can cast off what has been disk after disk after disk load of pretty heavy lifting software, at least from the consumer side? So I think that that's a really exciting question. I've been building web apps pretty much exclusively for several years now, and I'm really excited about software as a service and subscription-based models, and I'm really excited about the kinds of value that we can deliver to our customers using that model. So I'm really thrilled about the decision. I think that when people start using the Creative Suite tools, or the Creative Cloud tools, and they start to get used to having all those additional cloud-enabled features, they're gonna wonder how they ever got along without it, honestly. And I think as we progress and mature the platform, that's gonna become more and more apparent, and honestly, I think it's a more affordable model for a lot of people than having to save up your money and pony up $700 for a single piece of software. But it was also pretty heavy lifting computational stuff for people that aren't doing hardcore things at the enterprise, and to be able to do those in a browser, it's pretty spectacular. So a lot of that stuff is you actually download the apps still, they still run on your desktop. There are some apps that run entirely in the cloud, and you go to the website to use those apps. But most of the Creative Cloud Suite right now is all, it's all desktop apps, and we give you a really great download tool to download them, but then they also have additional capabilities that you didn't have before, like the ability to easily collaborate with people, people in different countries, people on different teams, sharing media files and resources, and seeing updates in real time, and things like that are just capabilities that we couldn't have easily put into the desktop app without the Creative Cloud platform. So I mean, it's really exciting stuff. Great, I'll have to get that one. So what's going on in Adobe, obviously Adobe is no stranger to user experience and user interface, so I want to get you to take, just kind of like as a developer looking at the landscape, there's still the eye on the prize. The prize is user experience and user expectation, and that's up in the air. You got some tech trends that are driving a technology, you mentioned tooling and platform general purpose stuff and the APIs and RESTful APIs as a platform, and that's going to go to the data center, it's going to drive all kinds of infrastructure, velocity, it'll cover all that stuff, but still you got to develop a great user experience. We are scooting here, we're doing, changing the game on scooters by embedding some stuff to some user experience, and so the user expectations are changing. How do you guys at Adobe, how do you guys talk about that internally? You got to do new things, you got to be innovating. What's your thoughts on the changing expectation? So internally this is really a technology story. We have the capability now of looking at how our users are using the apps and being able to react quickly to those changes, especially since we went into the Creative Cloud. We're able to respond a lot faster, we're able to patch the software a lot faster. With the subscription model, you don't wait two or three years to upgrade your app. If there's a user experience issue, we fix it and we fix it fast. And I think that that's a game changer for Adobe and I think that our ability to create mind-blowing user experiences has been exponentially grown. How about let's talk about development processes. So you go back to when I was a lad, software development techniques are pretty linear, and you had waterfalls, now it's like Agile has been great, that's a methodology, but Agile's been synonymous when you add cloud onto it, it's just push code and fix it when it breaks, kind of taking out the QA side of it, or crowdsource QA. You can do that on the web, the web is, you can be managed yet. But mobile now is blending, it's now a web experience, it's not just mobile anymore. Can Agile work on mobile? We were debating that on Android, it's getting updates every day, Apple's a little bit more closed than say the Android. So maybe you can update your stuff to code, add more Agile and say Android than Apple, but does Agile programming kind of fit the mobile model? I mean, web it's no problem. So you can do it more methodology, method cleaner on the QA side, or push it, break stuff like Mark Zuckerberg would say, and then fix it fast. Mobile's harder depending upon platforms. What's your take on that as a developer? So my take is that mobile is, I think in the future, right now a lot of people are doing native apps, and a lot of people believe that native apps are the way to go. But I think in the future, you're gonna see that all of that software lives in the cloud and we can update it, just like we update the web. And I think that that's really the direction that things are gonna go in that space. And I know Adobe certainly can't just push things to the cloud and fix it if it breaks. We have a rigorous testing cycle. I wasn't suggesting that. I wasn't suggesting that. Yeah, we have a lot of software. I mean, from a pre-packaged software standpoint, there's a lot of DNA to Adobe, so I'm sure that's pretty good. But the web guys you talk to, it's like, oh, let's start off some stuff. And I mean, nothing really breaks the whole site, but mobile could. So we were debating kind of the young startups. Can Agile work in mobile? I think that it can. And I've seen it work in some companies. Obviously, the sprints are a little bit longer because there's, in some cases, you push a release to your mobile app store and then it has to get cleared and that process takes, who knows how long. And then once it gets out there, it's kind of fixed there at that point for that whole cycle again. So you've gotta be careful about what you're pushing to mobile. Get back down on discipline. Yes, that's right. You still gotta have QA. You definitely need that QA process. And I think that that QA process is really critical. And I think one way that you can ensure that is to concentrate more on building better unit tests and better integration tests and to automate more of your testing process and to really make that a critical part of your process and don't squeeze it out like whatever you've got that's ready to go, that's what you push to production, right? You don't try to squeeze everything into your release and then squeeze out the time for testing. I really think it's essential to give testing the time that it deserves so that you really have a great product when you push. So, Eric, talk a little bit about kind of the rise of the citizen developer. We hear about that a lot. Obviously developers are getting a lot more face time. Your role is much more pronounced. But talk about how these tools and the kind of maturation of the infrastructure is enabling people that haven't been coding for a long, long time to start to actually code and make contributions. So I think that the bar for entry has like dramatically lowered. Everything that you need to create great code and push code to production is available for free. There's, everything's open source. You know, a lot of tooling, every bit of tooling that you need to produce a great app is just out there available for free. Oftentimes installed on the devices that you care about. So I think it's, I think that that is really great and the fact that there are really great tools is really great. I think that there's still a little bit of an education problem, especially in JavaScript. A lot of people are using JavaScript as an educational platform now, like Khan Academy, Code Academy. And I think that that's tremendous. That's a really good change. But then even among the more experienced JavaScript developers, there are misunderstandings about the nature of the language and how to use, utilize it most effectively. And so I think there's still a big education story to tell there. Okay. Well, obviously we're here at the Fluent Conference and we're getting all the low down final question for you. What's next for the JavaScript community? I see Jake, we were asking some history as well and that's been talked about here at Angular. All these new things, very exciting, new stuff happening. The developers wanna know what's going on that's relevant and just share your perspective of the Fluent Conference in context of the developers out there watching. What's the headroom? What are the things to watch? What are the things to think about and focus on? So some of the things that I think are really cool that are coming just around the corner is you're gonna see real-time updates as you're writing your code. You're gonna see your code updating in real-time inside the running JavaScript engine on node in the browsers. We're seeing demos of that stuff coming out right now and that's really cool, really powerful stuff. So I think the development process is gonna be much, much smoother. You don't have to do the whole edit, save, refresh, restart your server kind of thing that we're used to doing. So I think that that's gonna be really cool. There's also just the capabilities that are coming along, especially on the mobile frontier. Like those things that JavaScript can't do in mobile right now, they're dropping like flies, which is fantastic. So I think that- Performance house is big in the mobile environment. Yeah, it is. And performance in JavaScript, that's a really great story too. I mean, it's come a long way. I mean, now we're at the point where there's like, I think Brent and Ike said it was like 1.3X native C code performance with Asm.js, which is just stunning. I never would have thought that we could get that low and it's going lower. So I mean, the differential between native apps and JavaScript apps is disappearing. Which- Gotta be there. Eric Elliott from Adobe wrote a book about JavaScript app development in nosines and Alphabet. Gotta study up on Angular. Check out Angular. I know, good commentary on the plus. Thanks for sharing that. We're going to watch that. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage with theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the silly from the noise. We'll be right back with our next guest to wrap up day two here, our final day at Fluent Conference. We'll be right back into the short break. The Cube is this conceptual box, if you will. And we bring people inside of theCUBE and then we share ideas, but those ideas don't stay inside theCUBE. We explode that idea. We allow that idea to grow and grow and it does. So we really try to own the whole enterprise technology space. I mean, that's what we're all about. We take analysis, we take publishing, we take news and we take live TV and we combine it together in a product and share that with our community. No one's doing what we're doing. What we're doing, in my opinion, is the future of media, future of television, future of the internet. Video is an amazing, powerful product. So we work in what John and I talk about as a data model. People always say to us, well, how do you guys make money? We sell knowledge, we sell information, we sell data. So the problem that we are, that we identify is about what we call big, fast total data. Anybody can analyze a gigabyte of data. If you do a thousand gigabytes, that's a terabyte of data. You take a thousand terabytes, that's a petabyte of data. A thousand petabytes, that is a terabyte of data. So you are talking big data, lots and lots of data, and can you analyze it in real time as it comes in, right? The Cube is like, we call ESPN of tech because we want to cover technology like ESPN covers sports. John has a great vision for what's going to happen next in tech and so John is sort of that alter ego of mine that lets me see the future. I've worked with us, Michael Sean Wright, Mark Hopkins, you know, we've got Kim here today. We've got a team of people on our news desk run by Kristen Nicole. So she has a team that help feed us the news of the day, what's happening, the analysis. We have a team of analysts, they feed us information about what's happening and then really importantly, we have a community, a big community of many hundreds of contributors. We love technology, we love the innovation and that's what we do. We want to create a great user experience. And in order to do that properly, you've got to really, really prepare. theCUBE for the past year that we've been in operation has been very, very successful and companies do pay us to come here. I think the companies who bring us in with theCUBE get two things, they get a third party independent resource to provide knowledge to their audience who are seeking it as demand for the product and also compliments their existing media. We're here at an event and the company has their own TV organization and they have to pay a premium for that. So we compliment that by offering a objective, organic, third party, independent analysis of the event. That's why the top executives come in here. theCUBE is a comfortable place. It's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world and we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer. My entire career has been really built on relationships and talking to people and extracting knowledge from people largely in a belly to belly private forum. What theCUBE does is it explodes that to a huge audience. I mean, we've reached millions with theCUBE and it's real-time, it's live TV so you've got to be quick on your feet but you learn very fast and then you iterate from that learning. So John and I play off of that and we're constantly trying to up our game. Okay, we're back here live in San Francisco, day two of siliconangle.com's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the advanced district as soon as from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle and I'm joined by my co-host Jeff Frick from Silicon Angle, Wikibon and we are here to talk a video, a startup, front-end, a lot of challenges around rich media. Obviously real-time, they're talking about the developer action here at the Fluent Conference which is put on by O'Reilly Media, wall-to-wall coverage and one of the challenges is mobile, cloud, real-time, low latency, Node.js, JavaScript, all that stuff is coming together. Great for websites and rich media into the mix can be even more challenging. So our next guest is Lyle Shearer, front-end developer at Huddle. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. You guys obviously have a killer app that's well-received by sports enthusiasts and Jeff Frick has a lot to add on this subject because you're a user as well as a host of theCUBE and a user of this guest so I know you're static about this so I'll let you take it away. Yeah, I was excited to see the guys, they always wear their Huddle t-shirts so I grabbed them out of the Expo Center and asked them to come on board because I think Huddle's a really interesting story. One, it involves video which is never an easy thing to work with online with low latency and all the challenges that come with that. Two, you're dealing with football coaches who, A, maybe aren't the most technical savvy guy, I mean, more than football coaches but a lot of high school coaches and other coaches. And then three, kind of what I think is an interesting story is your guys progression from a technological point of view in terms of I know you started with Silverlight and then all the guys started getting apples and they're all crazy. Yeah, I got an apple, I can't get Silverlight to work and then now as you've slowly adopted mobile and bringing more multi kind of input devices into a single system and a multi-format system where you, and I'll just talk about it. You know, they created an app for the iPhone where you can do some of your work live at the field, you upload that, then that works in conjunction with the more legacy apps that you've built and then you work in an integrated fashion. So, I don't know, I guess it wasn't much of a question. I'm sorry, I hope to talk a little bit about the development challenges as you guys have had to change with changing technology kind of as your customer demands have changed. Yeah, certainly, I mean the company really started out working with the Huskers at UNL and at that point it was actually just a thick client application. So, it wasn't really about till 2008 I believe that we started making the move towards the web and towards the high school market and just sort of adapting the technology there and that just made it a lot easier for us to scale and to support a lot more a lower cost solution for high schools that was just as applicable to them as the more expensive the client was to professional and college teams. So, that was one real big change that really led us to take off and gain a lot of customers, a lot of speed and in growth there really grew our support team which I think is really a pivotal part of our success too. You know, we have a great product but we really have world-class support so like you said, some coaches aren't the best using different computers and different websites and handling technical support issues. So, that's definitely been a real help bridging that gap. We have really power high end users as well but so definitely a lot to our support. But yeah, as you mentioned, as we've grown we had the original just the basic web application but then obviously mobile inevitably is going to become a part of this. We kind of held off for a little while and we didn't really do any mobile web app type work for the longest time but we basically skipped over that and just went right to native started with iOS and iPad and just tried to get a really great, we saw that as a perfect delivery mechanism for video. I mean, that's what iPad is one of the strongest features of this video so that just seemed like the perfect platform to really start and dive into that mobile experience. So we did that and then of course slowly moved. Basically got a lot of experience with iOS and developing for iOS and then moved to the iPhone app and then also in the middle there sort of got an Android app out there which actually currently boosting and sort of getting up to speed with sort of our iOS devices and then more recently we've got a Windows 8 app also out to sort of support another big missing platform for us. So as far as watching and reviewing your video and everything for coaches and athletes definitely have a lot of options and really have your video wherever, whenever on the video upload side and then we also originally started with a Windows client to upload the video and then later got familiar with the Mac platform and that is support for, native support for Mac to really, because we saw a huge percentage of coaches that were just demanding that. Lyle, I want to ask you about user experience because you guys have a product that, you know, your target audience is not so tech savvy, coaches possibly, Jeff, you know what I'm talking about and there's a lot of user design issues but also some tech involved. We heard some folks who were talking about Node making it really fast on the latency side. Have you guys, have you identified those challenges and what kind of opportunities do you see in that area? Yeah, I mean, we're constantly, you know, at our core it's delivering video, it is our product and we've been slowly trying to incorporate, you know, like HTML, HTML5 video delivery and had issues with that in different areas. We still are sort of current main delivery other than the mobile apps is with SilverLite. So that does have some limitations. We also, you know, look into different capabilities of SilverLite and other medias, like the, I'm like on the name now, but being able to, you know, jump to the middle of the video clip without loading the entire thing. Some things like that. Yeah, I mean, one of the great things about Huddleton you guys have a real appreciation for your customer and football coach is just sure once heard stories whether you're into it or not. I mean, the guys have no time. They work, they work, they work their work and the other interesting thing is you can never look at too much film. You can always go back through the film and look at it again. So there's this real singular focus on speed and enabling those guys to do their job faster, having concurrent tagging for multiple people, trying to get it up, now having the preloaded tags from the app. Talk a little bit about how that kind of a design philosophy influences what you do. And then two, as you've adopted these other kind of mobile technologies, how that's enabled you to kind of rethink your application. Yep. So actually one of our sort of themes, one of our core themes, whenever we're doing design or, you know, working with a new feature, we always sort of go back to sort of a mantra just give me my damn video. And that's one that keeps ringing true because that is really what coaches want is to get at their video. And you know, maybe some other things, but at the core, they really want to watch their video. They want their players to watch their video, but they want to just get to the video, cut through everything else and just get that video. So that's something that's helped us, you know, keep bringing the focus back to where it needs to be not getting distracted by all these side features and little things, unless those help get you to your video quicker, more quickly. But yeah, we definitely have sort of taken some different approaches or being able to experiment a little bit with our mobile, our native apps, being able to sort of rethink like what is really the most important thing to experience here. So if you're using our web, you know, huddle.com, you know, the experience is a lot different because it's still sort of building on the original, the original idea, whereas the mobile is much more streamlined as just, you know, video, just minimal infrastructure to actually get to that and just being able to skip through really easily and really data-driven, being able to view plays based off different stats and just trying to really quickly navigate the video. The navigation is phenomenal. Like I said, if I had a nickel for all the hours I spent on huddle, I would be a rich man. So I want to thank you for coming on. I know we just kind of grabbed you and I got excited for bringing you Kazan because it's a great application. It's also a great story of a tech startup coming from not tech. I was an assistant coach. He needed a tool. He's got the tools. They built a great little tech company out in the heartland and have got tremendous market penetration, not only in high schools, but in colleges and also some proteins as well. And great end user experience. Ultimately the theme of the show is about user experiences. Congratulations. This is theCUBE here at O'Reilly's Fluent Conference. Tweet us, I'm at Furrier. Also tweet us any questions, we'll address them for you and go to the hashtag Fluent Conference, FluentConfCONF and we'll follow your tweets and bring you outside theCUBE. This is theCUBE at O'Reilly Media's Fluent Conference. We'll be right back after this short break. The Cube is this conceptual box if you will and we bring people inside of theCUBE and then we share ideas, but those ideas don't stay inside theCUBE. We explode that idea. We allow that idea to grow and grow and it does. So we really try to own the whole enterprise technology space. I mean that's what we're all about. We take analysis, we take publishing, we take news and we take live TV and we combine it together in a product and share that with our community. No one's doing what we're doing. What we're doing in my opinion is the future of media.