 We're here live at the Velocity Conference, the Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the ceiling from the noise. Tony Parisi is here, CTO at large, also web guru, he's been involved in standards. Going back to the early days of the web, pre-web, information superhighway, you know, back in the days with Tim Berners-Lee, and they moved to Cambridge, W3C. That was the beginning of the early days, which now is, we're in web, whatever version we're in. Tony, welcome to the Cube. You know, you've seen, you've seen this movie from the beginning. You know, you know the endings. You've been involved in the days when standard buys used to jockey for position. Just what's your take? We're going to get into a range of conversations, but I want to get your take on the current web environment right now. I see a lot of forces driving change. You got, you know, at least faster internet, you got broadband, and that's getting better on wireless. You have mobile, I'll say, it's changing the world, everyone knows that. So that's kind of all known. But you got cloud, velocity. Here's about the intersection of design, user experience, meeting dev ops, basically web ops, not just cloud, not just data center, not just enterprise, but really kind of the intersection of those two. So what's your take of, if you had to kind of peg a grade, give a grade to the current web, a letter grade, F-F-L, A-A, excellent, and what needs, what's happening that's hot that's being worked on? So, as always, I give the web an A for effort in terms of user experience, though, you know, execution over the last couple of decades has been kind of spotty. But, you know, if we want to do a performance grade right now, I'd say we're getting from the, you know, sort of getting into the B plus territory, just in terms of being able to deliver a quality, rich experience, which is where I come into this. And all the work being done in performance, though it seems like it's going to be all the work being done in performance, though it seems like it's backend work, really, is a lot about delivering a responsive, rich user experience. So, you know, well on the way and well into converging with mobile technologies as well. Yeah, I noticed in your background, you're involved in VRML, virtual reality markup language, which was, you know, right when HTML was still early days and web HTTP was just hitting the scene. And, you know, we all kind of know where that went. Obviously, the web is the web, and we want to talk about augmented reality. But before we get in there, the whole scene is a whole other level of user experience, which kind of is in your wheelhouse. Before we get to that, I want to talk more about, like, quickly the UI side right now. We're, you know, mobile, Facebook just launched its videos for Instagram, so that's a huge scale project, so that's web ops challenge, and yet a user experience. So it's not Vine, it's not 9 seconds, or it's 6 seconds. It's, you know, I mean, Twitter's got a 6 second video platform. I mean, it's kind of lame. So, I think they're sub-seeing in terms of the grade there, but, you know, getting better in terms of rich media. Yeah, no, we're not. I mean, in terms of rich media, certainly, HTML5 with user interface, though, has come a long way. You can build pretty much anything in HTML5 with CSS, spinning things, and animations that rival any native user interface you can build, not only a desktop, but a mobile at this point. When you get into the rich media, you know, video, and especially 3D, which is my area of expertise, and it's still coming along. There's basically bits and pieces of the technology platform that aren't there yet. There's a lot of practice that still needs to kind of evolve, you know, and I'm looking a lot at web performance of interactive 3D applications and the issues are, you know, they're still pretty significant. There's a lot of challenges there to make that, you know, a high performance rich media environment where you can just do it purely with web technologies and not have to fold in, say, you know, native. With the FUD that's being thrown around out, there's a lot of weirdness going on around HTML5. Some are saying it's too hard to work with, other people are abandoning it. I mean, it's just kind of a weird environment right now. Can you just kind of clarify your views on that? Yeah, my views only. It seems like there was a lot of FUD about a year ago with a couple of big companies saying it didn't work yet. The last couple of development conferences I've been at, I work with a lot of developers. You know, I go to the conferences, I attend, I talk to people. There have been some amazing demonstrations of pure HTML5 mobile applications that have true native performance. It's all about doing the engineering properly. So those earlier efforts or those big companies were dissing, you know, dumping all over HTML5. You know, I don't know exactly what was behind those projects, but it sure seemed to me like someone had thrown a few junior engineers at it and said, see what you can do, as opposed to putting a real professional team on it the way folks at Sencha and some of these other companies have done to really say, look, it's not perfect, but we know how to squeeze performance out of it. Let's throw some performance people at this and make it really work. And they've made it really work. You can scroll infinite lists, you can zoom and pan and do all these amazing user experience things that people said weren't possible at all on mobile, let alone with HTML5. So I just think, A, you know, you had people looking at it early, and B, you didn't have the right really professional people doing it. It was a half-hearted effort, and then people just basically dumped on the technology instead of sticking with it. I just don't buy any of it long story short. I totally agree with you. I think I would buy that. But let's talk about some of the market forces. The big dream right now is mobile, right? You have a lot of dreamers, right? And then the dream is, okay, I can make more money with mobile, so the proliferation is phenomenal. So there's a rapid push to get something out fast. Trying to use agile, that's not agile, but pushing out code that's not quality. And then you've got a dev-out problem, right? So Node.js is an interesting dynamic right now on mobile, which is fantastic, service-side JavaScript. It's really elegant, and you can do a lot of cool things there. But still, on the UI side with HTML5, there's the dreamers. I got to get my mobile app out. A lot of these frameworks are developing. Is that good or bad? I mean, it's almost, I want fast, but I got to do some engineering. So what has to happen? Is it just to get better coders? Will there be any tooling that will devolve, or what's your view on that? Yes and yes. This is all part of an evolution of an ecosystem. The tools are getting better. The browser platforms are getting better. People's experience with these technologies is maturing. So I think it's going to happen all in due time, but I think folks need to get their expectations set as well. They assume they could just write one line of code and it's going to work everywhere. It just doesn't work that way in practice, regardless, even between two browsers on a desktop, let alone a mobile. And also you're in the 3D and the UX side. Obviously the stack conversation is always an interesting one. And what do you think about Node.js and what that's happening with Node? Well, I'm personally a huge fan of Node.js for server side because I love JavaScript. I've become a real JavaScript, say, acolyte over the last five or six years. My background is in pretty hardcore software engineering, C++ and all the industrial strength languages that came before, you know, a decade ago. But JavaScript's a great, easy to use language and Node has made it really easy to program very responsive, asynchronous, messaging-based applications, especially when you're talking to these new database technologies, Mongo and Couch and these kind of things. We just had the reddest guy on earlier, just, you know, horizontally scalable. Yeah, very, very scalable, very event-driven, makes really good efficient use of your machine resources on the server, easy to host in the cloud. So it's another area where some people had to pioneer, you know, LinkedIn was one of the first to build a mobile app with a Node.js back in. They really had to pioneer how to use the technology effectively and they did a great job with it. But, you know, the practice evolves, the tech underneath evolved, the tools evolved. It's a classic example of the DevOps world too. The pioneers had to build their own because there wasn't any commercially available stuff. And which is, I love, this is the beautiful thing about the market we're in. But I got to move that quickly to your world, which is user experience, the design side. You know, we see things like Google Glass, it's got this augmented reality, you know, oh, that's what, it's almost, it's like the birth, it's like the seed of augmented reality. It's not necessarily the product, but it can open the mind up to some creativity. And so, that being one in the spectrum, HTML5 and other standards, what's in between? What do you see as the key things that are, that are technologies that are available and work being done around, whether it's 3D or really good user experience stuff? Well, so what I'm working in is a technology called WebGL. I write books in it. I consult with clients to build WebGL sites. And it's 3D rendering in your web browser. Works on a desktop browser, now works on the mobile browsers. Doesn't work on Google Glass yet, to my knowledge. I've seen it work on one of those Oculus Rift head mounts that you strap on your head. It's on Chrome. Look around. WebGL is in Chrome, it's in all the browsers. It's coming to Internet Explorer. They haven't shipped it yet. So, it's there. They're going to get tabs for it. Yeah, exactly. You know, they're catching up. And it's been leaked that they said they're going to do it. So, you can create a really incredible, rich experiences, interactive encyclopedia, full 60 frames a second, video games, product visualizations, looking at CAD models, walking through giant architectural spaces. You can do all that in a web browser or in a tablet now, with this kind of technology, without needing the head mounted displays, the glass or any of that. So, that's what gets me excited, having worked in that area close to 20 years ago, when everyone did think it was going to be about attaching head gear and all that. You don't really need that. I mean, a lot of 3D graphics, like the games you play every day, you're seeing it on your TV, it's on a flat screen. You don't necessarily need to have extra hardware for it on the display side. But it's pretty exciting what's going on with Glass. When they actually really make that work someday, I think we'll see WebGL and other web content really integrated in there, and that's exciting. But it sure seems like from the reports I've heard, it's going to take a little while for that to become product quality. Yeah, I totally agree. And we talked about that fluent. But the thing that's really interesting now is the 3D stuff we saw at I.O. was fantastic in Chrome, for instance. Even you got Firefox going native. WebSockets now more important than ever before. That's been kind of around for a while, but now with Node and WebSockets and the native browser, that's nice. It's a nice environment. Mobile, if that's currently kind of a nice position there, where's mobile relative to where you are in the browser? It's sort of a giant family of stuff. So you've got the desktop browsers innovating platform technology, but they're not the only ones innovating. They're farther ahead because you get sort of a fatter computer to work with than your typical mobile device. But on the mobile side, they're innovating all these use cases, all these user interface paradigms, all of the app store kind of way to buy things and all the swiping gestures. And that's something that came out of mobile first, very much a human-centered, human factors orientation. And now that, you see that stuff influencing the design of new HTML5 technologies as well. So it's sort of a next step on a convergence path. They're working on parallel tracks and they're influencing each other left and right here. So I see that as very exciting, sort of unequal footing where the new cutting edge technologies will sometimes make it into mobile when the platform can handle it. And a lot of times these new user interface paradigms are influencing what happens on a desktop browser. It's awesome. Yeah, and we were just commenting yesterday here in the cube about, hey, the word mobile won't even be kicked around anymore. It's just going to be it. It's web mobile. The mobile, it's just another device. So it's interesting. So I got to ask you, with all that, what are you watching? What are you personally watching right now? So you're involved in the WebGL and you have that history. You have a good perspective. You have a lot of experience. There's a lot of young guns coming into the market with CS degrees, hardcore programs. And you've got the newbies coming in and they want to just use off-the-shell stuff. So what are you watching for tooling, for platforms to accelerate that convergence? Yeah, this is going to be very specific and tacky. But I look at HTML frameworks and CSS frameworks like Bootstrap technologies like that, StyleSheet technologies that, if you're looking at what WebJocs do every day, they're spending a lot of time manually typing a lot of stuff. And so now we're seeing that getting professionalized to the point where you can build something that works mobile, works desktop, has a really crisp and easy to use user interface. So that's one area. Another area is on the performance stuff. That's why I'm here at the conference at Velocity is the rich media and performance convergence is pretty intense, right? To be able to create a web application that doesn't fall on its face getting to the user when it's also delivering this rich media in this open environment. It's no longer flash where you know, you've got one company that can sort of just control the pipeline and how it all works. You've got to make all these technologies work together. So there's interesting developments going on here at Velocity in that area too. Yeah, and the community is really a tight community. It's not like the classic cloud show or front-end show. It's a little bit of an integration. But we are starting to see the velocity kind of positioning crossover to the mainstream. We've got some, you know, state funds, big developers here from corporate guys. So, you know, is it ready for prime? Because now the corporate enterprise guys, whether it's a service provider or corporate, you know, they've been down the bone for just been no innovation in that market until now. They now see, hey, I can really change the game and have now higher developers. I can now rewrite and retool and try value, not just be this IT shop. So, you know, is that, where would you see velocity now? Is it crossing over? Is the community getting bigger? It has to because, you know, you're seeing all of this enterprise movement into the cloud. You're seeing all this application development going into the cloud. And you're seeing all of the sort of older proprietary software systems get their upgrades. Even from the people who made the software, they're upgrading themselves to make this brand new, you know, kind of app where no distribution, no extra software to get. It's running in the clouds, running in browser. And in order to do that effectively, you need to bring those kind of technologies to bear that velocity talks about. So, yeah, I think it's time for that to come front and center. And it converges with the, you know, 3D and rich media work I do. I'm doing a book signing here at the conference for one of the books I wrote. And, you know, I've got a lot of interest in WebGL and rich media from this crowd here. And could applaud for the book. What book is that? It's called, the current book is called WebGL Up and Running. And you can get it on Amazon or Riley's website today. And I'm actually doing a pre-release of a new book, Programming 3D Applications in HTML5. And so that's, you can go get the pre-release if you go online. Tony's what we call tech athlete. He's been there. He's seen all the movies before. He knows what the ending's going to be. It's going to be a good user experience. At the end of the day, that's what wins. Good performance. You know, relevant code. The right product always wins. Final question for you. You know, step back, looking at the 20-mile stair out in the industry. Given your experience, what's out there that's going to happen in your mind's eye that people aren't talking about or might not expect given all that stuff we just talked about? What do you see that might not be obvious to the people out there? Well, we do get kind of tied up in our own little world here, but I think that we've got to remember, and this has a lot to do with mobile. What we're calling mobile, like you said, that's not even going to be a term in a decade. We're going to forget it, is that everyone, everyone on the planet is going to have multiple computers. Multiple computers that are mobile. Their phones are all this. I mean, they don't today, but it's coming, even in the most remote parts of the third world. And we're all going to be connected all the time with the social media. What does that mean? I don't know what that world looks like in a decade. It's going to be powered by some web ops infrastructure, for sure. This is theCUBE. This is the Velocity Conference. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Velocity Conference. Go to the hashtag Velocity Conference. C-O-N-F. Velocity C-O-N-F is the hashtag. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.