On November 4, 2022, the Huawei Developer Conference 2022 (Together) kicked off in Huxi Village, Songshan, Dongguan, bringing a new pattern of Hongmeng ecological development. In the keynote speech, Gong Ti, President of Huawei’s Device BG Software Department, centered on the declarative development system, put forward three concepts of Hongmeng ecological application development, and upgraded the development kit to "Hongmeng development kit", using innovative technologies to comprehensively accelerate the evolution of Hongmeng ecological commercialization .
The new upgrade of "Hongmeng Development Kit" helps developers develop for the era of Internet of Everything
HarmonyOS accelerates, development first. HarmonyOS continues to pay attention to the voice of developers, and is committed to continuous innovation in many aspects such as development efficiency, application performance, development cost, security and reliability, which are widely concerned by developers. Facing the Internet of Everything era, Huawei believes that traditional application and service development methods will also usher in new changes. To this end, Huawei proposes three application and service development concepts: multi-device deployment at one time, free flow that can be separated and combined, and unified ecological native intelligence. It provides multiple capabilities to assist developers in view of the characteristics of multiple devices, multiple entrances, and services that can be separated and combined. Lower the development threshold and improve efficiency; at the same time, HarmonyOS will unify the ecology with OpenHarmony, embrace the three-party framework, and provide layered and easy-to-use AI capabilities for developers to quickly integrate, and use the powerful AI capabilities preset by the system to reduce the development of smart applications. threshold.
The detailed introduction of the three concepts of HarmonyOS ecological application development will be published in the "Hongmeng Ecological Application Development White Paper", and developers can go to the HarmonyOS official website to download.
Focusing on the three core development concepts, Huawei has released a new and upgraded Hongmeng development kit based on the declarative development system, including the design system HarmonyOS Design, the development language ArkTS, the development framework ArkUI, the compiler ArkCompiler, the development tool DevEco Studio, and the testing tool DevEco Testing And AppGallery Connect, a launch and distribution platform, has been fully optimized from the design, development, testing, and launch processes to help developers quickly join the Hongmeng ecosystem.
Huawei hopes to create a harmonious and pleasant user experience, and has comprehensively upgraded the three modules of the design system (standard system, design resources, and design tools) to help developers design a simple and stylish visual experience for each application. In terms of design specifications, HarmonyOS Design has added a full set of design specifications for cockpit, whole-house intelligence, and folding screens, fully covering Huawei 1+8 devices and Hongmeng Zhilian devices. In terms of design tools, the responsive layout controls have been upgraded to support more flexible layouts, and the first "adaptive UI engine" has been implemented on folding screens. Developers do not need to pay attention to different screens, and the UI interface automatically switches from small screen to large screen layout. In the future, this technology will continue to evolve to cover more device forms. In addition, in terms of design resources, the HarmonyOS font library has been upgraded again, adding support for the new version of national standard Chinese characters and all Chinese characters in the "Xinhua Dictionary". The icon and sound effect resource library has also been commercially upgraded. All commercial-grade design resources are completely free for developers. open.
In order to better promote ecological evolution, HarmonyOS has built a new declarative development language ArkTS based on the JS/TS language system. In addition to being compatible with the JS/TS language ecology, ArkTS expands the declarative UI syntax and lightweight concurrency mechanism, making cross-end interface development and parallel task development more efficient and concise, and increasing application development efficiency by 30%. In the future, the ArkTS language will continue to optimize and evolve, with the goal of becoming a more concise and efficient "superset" of the JS/TS language.
In order to better solve the shortcomings in the performance of the JS/TS language development system, Huawei has made technical breakthroughs in the development framework ArkUI and the compiler ArkCompiler.
Compiler ArkCompiler, aiming at the problem of slow application startup due to uncertain variables and compilation, parsing and optimization in traditional dynamic type languages, breaks through that dynamic languages can be compiled with types, supports object persistence and rebinding technology, and realizes The industry's first dynamic type language AOT compilation mode, which can significantly shorten the application start-up and running time. With the support of ArkCompiler, high-load complex applications can start up 30% faster in low-configuration models than in traditional models. At the same time, ArkCompiler also provides a variety of source code protection technologies to greatly improve the security of JS/TS type source code.
The development framework ArkUI has completely upgraded the back-end rendering mechanism, using the latest Diff algorithm, no need to refresh the interface content based on the comparison between the COMPONENT tree and the ELEMENT tree, but directly comparing the nodes in the RENDER tree, no longer need three tree, which realizes the three-in-one rendering algorithm tree (NODE tree). This new rendering mechanism greatly simplifies the tree structure of the declarative development framework, greatly optimizes the interface layout rendering performance, and increases the sliding loading speed of the application interface by 45%.
Through the combination of two breakthrough technologies, ArkCompiler and ArkUI, high-load applications developed in ArkTS language can also run smoothly on low-configuration mobile phones.
At the same time, ArkUI also builds a new development model "Stage" model. Stage is a standardized process management development model. It builds more than ten kinds of background process pull-up specifications, so that applications can be launched according to the process specifications during the development stage, avoiding The background process encroached on system resources disorderly. In this way, the process environment is guaranteed to change from "disordered" to "ordered", and the application experience is optimized.
In addition, the Stage model also realizes the separation of logic and UI, which further simplifies the flow development steps and greatly improves the efficiency of cross-terminal flow development.
In terms of development tools, HUAWEI DevEco Studio has been upgraded to version 3.1, supporting a comprehensive upgrade of ArkTS declarative development. It supports various practical functions such as hot reloading, intelligent editing, cross-language debugging, and multi-project management, helping ArkTS cross-terminal application development efficiently and quickly. debugging.
Not only that, the HarmonyOS testing tool and on-shelf distribution service have also been fully upgraded to match the ArkTS application. DevEco Testing provides special tests for ArkTS cross-terminal applications, and AppGallery Connect realizes one-click distribution of ArkTS cross-terminal applications.
HarmonyOS 3.1 developer preview released
At the meeting, Huawei also released the HarmonyOS 3.1 version that can experience the Hongmeng development kit. The HarmonyOS 3.1 SDK will fully upgrade the ArkTS declarative application development. It is estimated that by the first quarter of 2023, it will support 10,000+ ArkTS APIs, with multiple capabilities such as declarative UI, application development framework, distributed system services, multimedia, WEB, and communication, and can support ArkTS commercial application development. At the same time, Huawei HarmonyOS has been compatible with OpenHarmony API capabilities since version 3.0, and version 3.1 released this time is compatible with OpenHarmony API 9. In the future, HarmonyOS will continue to evolve based on OpenHarmony, and Huawei will continue to invest in the co-construction of the OpenHarmony open source project.
Developers can experience the HarmonyOS 3.1 Developer Preview version during HDC2022. Huawei expects to release the HarmonyOS 3.1 Beta version in January 2023 and the HarmonyOS 3.1 Release version in March 2023.
The upgrade of the Hongmeng development kit is the determination of HarmonyOS to take the declarative development system as the direction, marking that the Hongmeng ecology will usher in a new stage of development. In the future, HarmonyOS will continue to evolve based on the declarative development system and the three major concepts, and comprehensively accelerate the advancement of the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Huawei looks forward to working with developers to build the Hongmeng world and create infinite possibilities together.
