IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2020 - 67

Column: Bits versus Electrons

What I Want for CES
Bob Frankston

& CES IS THE gift-giving, sorry, I mean receiving
holiday for techies. This year I am hoping to see
devices that enable me to take advantage of the
maturing of the browser as an application platform. I also want to be able to assume connectivity that just works without the artificial barriers of
paywalls and castle walls (security perimeters).
The other major theme is liberation from
being tethered to a distant web or, more to the
point, the cloud. While I want the ability to access
remote services, we need to assure that our applications and devices work and interwork locally,
even if there is no connection to the larger world.
This is resilience and safety and economics and,
well, basic rights. It's also a good design.

BROWSERS AND NODEJS
In 2014, I wrote about using HTML5 as an
environment. The browser has indeed evolved
and, increasingly, Progressive Web Applications
(PWAs) allow one to do full-fledged applications
using JavaScript.
NodeJS has extended this capability to platform applications independent of the browser
using the same JavaScript engines. Other tools,
such as TypeScript and Visual Studio Code have
greatly improved the development process by
making the programming tools act as an assistant.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2019.2940844
Date of current version 6 December 2019.

January/February 2020

JavaScript may have started as a language for
casual applications, but it was built on a solid foundation of software concepts. More importantly,
perhaps, the browser environment is meant to be
very safe to visit, which also makes it a very forgiving environment. NodeJS has fewer of the protections, but that's what I want for my applications
that run on my own machine.
What is surprising to many is that JavaScript
is now a high-performance language thanks to
techniques, such as dynamic compilation and
memorization. For web applications, there is the
additional benefit of a rich environment.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are applications
with the browser as the operating environment.
The word "Progressive" is used to refer to the ability to take advantage of capabilities as they become
available and to adapt to various platforms. It
allows us to write applications that can run on
essentially any device without annoying installs.
That said, there are still serious limitations to
writing such applications, and I want those
addressed.
The design point of PWAs, as per their name,
is the web with the idea that the application is a
cached version of a remote site. I want to write
real applications that are purely local and connect to the devices. One annoyance is that the
SSL certificates (HTTPS) confirm that the site
you reached matches the DNS name on the certificate and nothing more. We need mechanisms
that do not rely on the Domain Naming System

Published by the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society

2162-2248 ß 2019 IEEE

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2020