The recent years have witnessed tremendous activity in the area of application development. We’ve also seen platforms emerge and disappear by the passing day. What in your opinion would it take for a platform to grow through the ranks?
Application development and platforms for development is an evolving process. The developer has to make a choice on quite a few new variables than the development platform alone. E.g. In recent years cross platform applicability code, importance of User Experience, Security and manageability of code, application monetization methods and access to a large third party API base have evolved. This has made the developer choice a difficult one on which areas to focus on. That’s why it may appear that the platforms have a shorter life. The developers are exploring, experimenting with these new Developer dimensions and looking at how these new tools help them to shorten the life cycle of the project or an app.
If these new variables are able to sustain the developer interest and provide them the right mix of agility, performance and applicability for creating new usages, the “lego” model of app development will be here to stay for a long time and we see the app development platform as a collection of many components than a monolithic stack.
A successful platform either has to provide these critical stack components or has to be open to accept the third party APIs and allow the developer to mash up together.
With the heavy focus on Android, has Intel settled with Android for mobile devices as its preferred platform?
Intel has always believed in port of choice for app developers, Intel on its platforms has supported a wide choice of Operating system choices. On the Mobile devices platform, Intel has started with Meego, now part of Tizen and Android as a port of Choice. With increased number of developers adopting Android worldwide, it will benefit developers to also explore Intel architecture to develop applications.
What is the approach towards Tizen going to look like in the near horizon?
Intel participates in the fully open software platform, Tizen™, an evolution of the MeeGo project. Tizen is an open source project led by the LiMo Foundation and the Linux Foundation. It is a Linux-based operating system platform based on emerging standards including an application programming interface based on HTML5 and other web standards. Tizen is backed by many major Linux proponents and will be supported and promoted as a viable open source alternative with a transparent governance structure that spans across multiple device segments including netbooks, tablets, connected TVs, smartphones and IVI systems.
Last Spring, the Tizen project reached a major milestone by providing the open source developer community with a Tizen 1.0 (“Larkspur”) SDK and source code for smartphone devices. The Tizen 2.0 source code and SDK (called Magnolia) were released in February 2013. The release allows OEMs to consider Tizen 2.0 for their commercial devices, and open source developers to look into Tizen to find what they can improve and contribute. It also allows developers to begin to develop and port apps to the Tizen platform.
Intel is very committed to the development of Tizen. We see a unique role for Tizen in the industry to create and to grow a new, open and flexible, mobile operating system that allows developers to write once/run on many devices. Tizen has received broad industry support through the Tizen Association and has achieved major milestones this year including establishing the storefront, releasing the Tizen 2.1 source code, the Tizen IVI 2.0 and the Tizen 2.2 Beta SDK that was just released recently.
On 9th July, The Tizen org has announced an application challenge which offers prizes of 4 Million USD. This challenge will help to expedite the applications availability in Tizen store across 9 different categories. Details available at https://developer.tizen.org/contests/tizen-app-challenge
What are points a developer must consider before adapting a platform of choice?
The developer used to think about a certain dimensions for a software development project. Functionality of the code, IDE or dev environment used and performance for a workload used to be the key points any developer used to be focused on. Today the developer dimensions are evolved to add more vectors which include Cross Platform development needs, User Experience, App monetization, increased use of Cloud services and application security.
These changes will force the developer to look at more open platforms for development, platforms which will allow accessing a host of APIs and services without impacting performance and user experience. The developers are also expecting faster time to code and access to SDKs compared to native programming.
What is Intel’s stand on open source software and philosophies?
Intel has long been committed to furthering innovation through open platforms and technologies. It’s in our DNA. For over two decades, Intel has helped provide a solid foundation for open-source innovation.
Today, we are a top contributor to the Linux kernel and a significant contributor to many other open-source projects that span the solution stack.
- We are a significant contributor to upstream projects such as Tizen, Linux, Chromium, Webkit, Mozilla, JavaScript, Android, and Polyfills like jQuery
- In fact, Intel is the 3rd most prolific contributor of patches to Webkit, with over 500 patches (Sep 2012)
- We are also contributing APIs and implementing code to take advantage of performance and power capabilities of Intel platforms, such as Parallel JavaScript on Mozilla
- Optimizing HTML5 for various OSs, including Tizen
Intel is actively involved in many aspects of W3C standards development and part of many working groups. Intel is an active participant in the W3C Systems Application Working Group—the first group dedicated to defining and driving application API standards for HTML, JavaScript and CSS—offering 10 of 17 specification editors , Intel is also a steward of the W3C Web Platform Docs community site, a key industry-wide source for web developer documentation, resources and content.
