The future belongs to open solutions – Krzysztof 'Procek' Scira

Before you is the third installment of the series "3 questions to the speaker". Today we present an interview with Mobile Trends conference veteran Krzysztof 'Procek' Scira, who will speak at the opening of "Development Day".

Grzegorz Kozubowski: One often hears opinions in the mobile environment that web applications are slow. So is it worth investing money in the development of such products?
Krzysztof 'Procek’ Scira: Here I have to agree with this allegation, although I would pose a somewhat counter-intuitive question: why are web apps free? There are many reasons for this – several of which I touched on in my talk at Mobile Trends 2021. Unfortunately, the belief still persists that we can retrain a novice developer cutting simple web pages to create applications in Phonegap and within a week we have an unprecedentedly cheap (for the mobile application market) labor force. What's worse – an experienced JAVA or Objective C programmer is ready to think that HTML5, CSS3 and JS is manageable in one weekend and then hell begins…
It should be noted, of course, that Cordova / Phonegap, Titanium or other such wonders use WebView – so there are limited resources at our disposal and we have to reckon with it. If the "business" wants based on web technologies to create e.g. 3D games is a platform selection error that even the best programmer will not correct.
However, by applying Phonegap to the tasks it is designed for, using fast web solutions and controlling performance early on in the application development process, we can get satisfactory results. It is worth noting here the way of managing the entire IT project – we create a multiplatform application, so we can complete the project faster, and by the way, later development does not need separate teams of developers.
What do you think is the future of hybrid applications?
Phones are getting faster, support for HTML5, CSS3 and JS is getting better and better, and front-end programming is developing very rapidly – just look at what a breakthrough was created by the emergence of the Angular JS framework – finally some reasonable application architecture known from other languages. I think it will be an increasingly popular way of developing applications given that completely new platforms are becoming dependent on web applications precisely. These platforms are no longer limited to mobile devices (BlackBerry 10 or Firefox OS) but are also found on very non-mobile ones (Samsung SmartTV, node-webkit).
Of course, the future belongs to open-source solutions, and here the new Cordova looks very good – the project has matured, lived to see a central repository of plug-ins, and is increasingly chosen by developers.
It may sound audacious, but in my opinion, low-level programming will be used in a few years to write applications for refrigerators, washing machines or dishwashers 🙂
Mobile Trends Conference 2021 is coming up, where we can also hear your lecture. What will your lecture be about?
This is my third consecutive appearance at Mobile Trends, and I hope that this time, too, the audience will be satisfied with my lecture. The topic as usual related to web programming, but this time from a slightly different perspective – from the position of the user. A user who is discerning, who wants a fast, colorful and pretty application; where everything works as if by magic.

So we'll try to charm it – if for some reason we can't provide it with adequate performance then let's at least give it the illusion that our app is really fast.
The presentation itself will, of course, include a handful of practical examples, but this year I will also try to reach out to developers programming natively, because some tricks are universal.