What RIAs should know about my three days at Google's I/O conference

Nevin’s note: Rent is high in Sausalito, Calif. But as Brooke pointed out to me last time I was complaining about it, the high price can be looked at as “paying your dues” to be in the neighborhood of so many tech-minded and entrepreneurial people. Indeed it’s been paying off; many of the 5,000 people at Google I/O, Google’s annual conference in San Francisco for Web- and mobile-app developers, had to fly in from across the country or even across the Atlantic. I took the ferry across the bay, and then biked home across the Golden Gate.

I went to Google’s annual developer conference in late May with two hats on: I was there to learn how to better leverage the Google technology that RIABiz runs on, and also to find out what’s coming next to the Web world and see how it might affect RIA tech vendors.

It turns out there really is something relevant to report on: HTML5. HTML5 is a new standard for Web browser technology that’s being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (often called the “W3C”). You have probably heard of HTML – it’s the language that practically all Web pages are written in, and HTML5 is the 5th revision. When it is complete, all new browsers will support the new standard, which will allow websites to do new and interesting things.

SaaSy

Many RIAs are already using software-as-a-service (often called “SaaS”) applications; whenever you log in to a piece of software in your browser rather than installing it on your computer, you are using it “as a service.” There are advantages to this, including the ability of the vendor to continuously upgrade the software on one central server, rather than having to redistribute a desktop version for each update.

But there are disadvantages too – the user experience is often not as nice when constrained into a browser, and applications are close to useless without an Internet connection. HTML5 (and other emerging technologies) are aimed at minimizing those downsides, among other things.

Progressive vendors of SaaS applications ought to read up, and RIAs looking for the most innovative vendors should keep their noses in the air for mention of this new buzzword. I’ll get into some of the details in a minute.

Devices galore

The conference started with a keynote from Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, who acted as an MC throughout the event. Aside from all of the technical sessions to help attendees learn about the Google (and non-Google) technology that’s new this year, the company used the event to announce a new version of its mobile operating system called Android, and its newest product, Google TV, which is a system for viewing online video and surfing the web from a television set.

The crowd of 5,000 people from 66 countries was a sight to behold. Google gave each attendee one Android phone in advance and another one during the event, so by the end everyone was walking around with their regular phone, two extra phones, and a laptop. You couldn’t stand anywhere in the three-story Mascone West without a power strip in sight. Conference registration was $400 (or $100 for Academia), and has sold out very early the past two years.

Developer sandbox

But despite this digital overload, the level of human interaction was high in the “Developer Sandbox” — a whole floor full of small booths, each representing a website or service that showcased some new tech. I met the developer behind the Times Skimmer — the new app from the New York Times that is meant to make it easier to browse through stories, and we exchanged ideas on how to revolutionize Web publishing. Rest assured we will do what it takes to keep RIABiz on the leading edge of the curve.

Many of the developers were there to learn about making apps for Android. The rest were mainly people like me; they run websites, and have realized that building on top of the tools Google has released for developers can significantly reduce the time it takes to do neat things on the Web.

In the recent past, the investment required to get an interactive web site up and running was relatively large, because it required buying dedicated server space and paying professional developers with decades of experience.

Web frameworks are sets of code that developers can use so that they don’t have to start from scratch. Many enterprise frameworks (like J2EE and ASP.NET) were cumbersome in their earlier days, and so development was slow. They had steep learning curves and were meant for high-budget projects. The introduction of simpler, free Web frameworks (like Ruby on Rails and Django), and cloud hosting services like Google App Engine (on which RIABiz is hosted) have made this process cheaper and faster.

But the majority of innovative websites are doing things that were never dreamed of a decade ago, using core technology that wasn’t meant for what they are doing. It has taken developers all this time working together to collaboratively make better frameworks that can squeeze enough neat functionality out of normal browsers.

Technologies have been created along the way to do more with the Web, and usually these technologies are added in the form of browser plugins. An obvious example is Adobe Flash, which has been widely adopted and allows video and animation. YouTube and the ad banners here on RIABiz both run on Flash.

HTML5

But lately much thought has gone into natively supporting the innovative things developers want to do with Web apps, and the result is HTML5. HTML5 will support many things that required plugins in the past, so soon including a video on a Web page won’t require Flash anymore. But that’s not all — the scope extends to functionality that will likely impact the apps that RIAs use.

For example, Google released a browser plugin called “Gears” a few years ago that allows websites to store data on your computer, so that you can open them up and perform some actions even when you have no Internet connection. This is a very cool feature, but since it wasn’t as widely adopted as Flash, it wasn’t very appealing to developers who were afraid that their users wouldn’t want to go through the hassle of downloading and installing it separately. HTML5 will natively support this feature with no plugins, so once enough people are using new browsers that run HTML5, developers can leverage this functionality with the confidence that it will work on everyone’s machine with no trouble.

Could be huge for RIA tech

For vendors developing RIA tech, this new development could be huge. Those that leverage this new technology right away will step ahead of their competition. They will be able to offer RIAs things like the offline access to online applications. Ultimately, this will blur the line between a desktop and a Web application, so that we’ll see the benefits of each without any of the present drawbacks.

Also, the time it takes to make and update applications that run in Web browsers will, it’s hoped, go down with HTML5 and other emerging technologies, meaning vendors will be able to be more responsive to client demand, and spend less time futzing with their app to make it work in all browsers.

A whimsical Web comic from 2006 described the time breakdown of modern Web development accurately when it allotted over 50% to things like “Time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet Explorer” and “Swearing.” This breakdown has gotten better in the past four years, and my fingers are crossed that HTML5 will mark the biggest advance yet.

You can see geeky photos from Google I/O 2010 here.