Introduction: Around 2010, various big data applications entered an explosive period. If the previous web applications are more "generating" data, then after 2010, how to better "display" data has been raised to a new level, and many front-end technologies have also opened a new chapter. . The author of this article combines his own practice to share the impact of big data and artificial intelligence on the development of front-end technology from three aspects: data visualization, software Webization and interactive diversification.
Overview
Because I have been doing front-end work related to the Alibaba Cloud Feitian big data platform for a long time, I have been thinking about a question: "What is the difference between the front-end of big data and the front-end of other businesses", specifically, in the big data and artificial intelligence What is the impact on the development of front-end technology under the current wave of development?
Take the Aliyun Feitian big data platform that the team is in charge of as an example. From writing the first line of code in 2009, it is now the 11th year of Alibaba's big data development. I joined Ali in 2011. Since then, I have been responsible for big data-related front-end work, and basically participated in most of the historical process of Ali's big data development. Looking back now, I am very fortunate to have entered the industry during a historical period of change, and I am more fortunate to witness the birth of some epoch-making data products and the changes they have brought to front-end technology.
If we regard 2010 as the first year of the application of big data Web products, we will find that it is an interesting year. Why do we say that?
Looking back at the development history of the front-end, there was a major technological change around 2005, the transition from Web1.0 to Web2.0.
Prior to this, the front end was more of a static display of pure content, such as the official websites of Apple and Yahoo at that period in the picture below.
After that, the front end began to gradually become a dynamic web page with multiple interactions. One of the important historical signs was the application of Gmail to new technologies such as Ajax.
Around 2010, various big data applications entered an explosive period. Many well-known Ali applications basically showed their heads during that period. Now looking back at that period of history, one of the big reasons is that with the Internet After the great development, especially after Web2.0, the data has exploded.
The following figure shows this trend well. If the previous Web applications were more in the stage of "generating" data, then how to better "display" data after 2010 has been raised to a new level. Many front-end technologies It also opened a new chapter.
Later, I will combine my own practice to talk about the impact of the wave of data intelligence on the development of front-end technology with three main lines: data visualization, software pan-Web and interactive diversification.
data visualization
Under the wave of big data, one of the most obvious characteristics is the exponential growth of data. This trend can be seen from the figure above. The challenge that follows is how to display data more vividly and interactively, which is what we usually Talk about "data visualization".
Going back to the technology itself, the biggest impact of data visualization on the front end should be to greatly promote the development of SVG, Canvas and WebGL.
Among them, in addition to the upgrade of the browser's underlying technology, a large number of excellent works have also emerged in the upper-level visualization library and visualization applications, among which the outstanding ones include:
- Open source technology component level
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- AntV
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- Echarts
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- HighLights
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- ...
- Data visualization products
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- Alibaba Cloud's large-screen visualization product DataV
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- Alibaba Cloud's Quick BI
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- BI analysis tool Tebleau
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- Analytical products in special fields, such as Plantir
There are many opportunities in different scenarios in professional subdivisions, such as geography, security, new retail, and other fields. Specifically, for example, in the DataWorks[1] product of our Alibaba Cloud's one-stop big data development and governance platform, there are interesting visualizations such as DAG for process orchestration, graph analysis[2], and blood relationship analysis of data.
Software Web
You should have noticed a phenomenon recently: the Web system is becoming more and more complex, many of the original desktop-side multi-interactive applications are gradually "pan-Web", and even many applications are the first version of Web technology.
The pan-Web mentioned here can be divided into two types in terms of performance:
One is to directly use front-end technology to make desktop software. The landmark event is the booming development of NW.js and Electron after they started in 2013; the familiar IDE VSCode is a typical representative of them; Ali’s desktop version has a large number of UI layers. Web technology used.
The other is to implement it directly on the Web. For example, you can see various Web'X' systems (Google Docs) recently.
The driving force behind this is that as browsers gradually become unified, cross-end can be realized more conveniently with its technology, and the other is the rise of cloud computing big data, especially the cloud storage and computing power gradually break through the original The performance boundary of the local PC has reshaped the original entrance of human-computer interaction.
There is no need to talk about the benefits of cross-terminal, I want to focus on the second point. To talk about this logic, I have to briefly talk about the development of computers, from the world's first general-purpose computer "ENIAC" covering an area of 170 square meters, to personal PCs in the Apple and Microsoft era, iPhone and Andriod in the mobile era, and then Large computing clusters in the cloud computing era.
For developer tools, many of the previous software was local, because it often uses the computing power of a local PC, but it is definitely not enough to calculate local computing power in the big data scenario. It depends on cloud computing. Cluster (for our Ali Feitian big data platform, we have a scale of 100,000 computing clusters), how to use these computing power more conveniently and flexibly on the user side is our front-end focus, and this is the original Either the software architecture can not allow you to customize, or the cost of customization is very high (sometimes even more than the cost of doing a new set), so many systems will choose to set sail for a version.
Among them, we are responsible for the two major pieces in Alibaba Cloud's Dataworks: WebIDE and WebExcel, which are very typical examples.
Dataworks was designed and developed based on the idea of cloud native from the beginning. The back-end needs to provide strong computing power through cloud computing to replace the original local computing power. The front-end needs to implement a more sophisticated architecture design to correspond to the increasingly complex interactive capabilities; Our application, it includes but not limited to:
- Architecture level
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- State management
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- Plug-in
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- ...
- Complex interactive components
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- Editor
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- Form/Excel
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- Tree
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- Logivew
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- ...
Interactive diversity
Recently this year, under the vigorous development of data-driven artificial intelligence, especially in image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing, great breakthroughs have been made, and new front-end interactions have also made great progress.
UX
In user-oriented (UX) products from GUI (Graphical User Interface) to XUI, users can not only use the mouse and keyboard to operate the graphical interface, but also provide new forms of interaction through facial expressions, body movements, and voice interaction.
The following picture shows some human-computer dialogues and some practices in interactive games in Alibaba Cloud ET around 2016. For details, please see here [3].
This round of technological change has two major macro backgrounds.
The third wave of AI technology
With the maturity of deep learning technology, the improvement of computing power, and the wealth of big data accumulated in the Internet era around 2010, artificial intelligence technology has begun a road of revival that is very different from the past; respectively in speech recognition, image recognition, and natural Fundamental breakthroughs have been made in language processing and other related technologies.
For example, from 2012 to 2015, in the ImageNet competition (ILSVRC), which represents the most cutting-edge development of computer intelligent image recognition, the participating artificial intelligence algorithms made rapid progress in recognition accuracy. In 2014, when recognizing people, animals, vehicles or other common objects in pictures, computer programs based on deep learning surpassed the recognition accuracy of ordinary human eyes.
The following picture is taken from "Artificial Intelligence" by Kaifu Li, which reflects this trend:
WebRTC
For the front end, another prerequisite is the maturity of the WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) technology. It was open sourced on June 1, 2011 and included in the W3C recommended standard of the World Wide Web Consortium with the support of Google, Mozilla, and Opera. Through it, the front end can conveniently process images, videos, voices and other content. Everyone currently sees that many interesting interaction bottom layers rely on him.
DX
For front-end developers (DX): Intelligent methods can improve our R&D efficiency and experience. Based on the implementation of Alibaba and Ant, Imgcook (D2C: Desgin to Code), code intelligent prompt [4], intelligent visualization AVA [5], front-end machine learning pipcook[6] are all very interesting attempts.
to sum up
The above are some of my thoughts on the development of front-end technology under the data wave in practice. Of course, front-end technology has made such great progress in recent years. In addition to data intelligence, other major trends (such as mobile Internet, 5G, IoT) have also profoundly affected the direction of front-end technology, but these are not within the scope of this article. There are opportunities Discuss with everyone again.
I have always liked Wu Jun’s view in the book "The Age of Intelligence": "2% of people will control the future, become them or be eliminated." I hope that all front-end students can find their own position in this wave of data intelligence.
Write at the end
If you are interested in this area and want to come to Alibaba to do big data and artificial intelligence-related work, please feel free to send me a private message or resume to me: [email protected]. We work together to do something meaningful, and the team recruits people for a long time.
Related Links
[1]https://www.aliyun.com/product/bigdata/ide
[2]https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/132393588
[3]https://www.zhihu.com/question/56560321/answer/203249193
[4]https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/115377444
[5]https://github.com/antvis/AVA
[6]https://github.com/alibaba/pipcook
Original link: https://developer.aliyun.com/article/776699?
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