Google JavaScript with Malte Ubl

Google search is a highly interactive JavaScript application as you enter a query results are being automatically suggested to you before you even finish typing when you press enter some of your search results may be widgets that represent the weather or the price of a stock or a recipe for green bean soup or a language translation for a phrase these complex front-end components are loading dynamically the Google Search application is not prefetching every

single possible widget that you might ask for it's not pretty fetching the weather widget and the price of a stock widget and the currency conversion widget all of these things are a little bit expensive and they would slow down the page if Google were to prefetch the JavaScript for all of these different components but the results do load very quickly if you search for a currency conversion Google loads the results of

that currency conversion widget quite quickly so you know that Google is doing some advanced JavaScript engineering to deliver you the code for that currency conversion widget very quickly and Google has many other examples of advanced JavaScript programming the company is mostly known for back end engineering inventions like MapReduce and tensor flow and Dremel and spanner and to turn these back-end tools into user facing products Google develops its

own JavaScript frameworks and infrastructure to deliver information from the back end to the front-end back-end and front-end are terms that are not very precise a back-end is a back-end only relative to a front-end and at Google there are so many layers of infrastructure between a user and the data center that if you're an engineer

working on a service at Google you probably have several front ends on one side of you and several backends on either side of you it's a multi-layered multi-tiered sure Malta Ubel is a senior staff engineer at Google and he's heavily involved in Google's JavaScript infrastructure he has written about managing large JavaScript applications in detail and he also works on amp which is an open source project for delivering

webpages in a fast performant format malta joins the show to describe Google's history with JavaScript frameworks the process of building front ends and middleware to deliver JavaScript applications and the engineering behind the amp project there are criticisms of amp but some of them misunderstand how the amp technology actually works amp allows pages to be cached and pre fetched and served to a

user more quickly in the case of Google search when you search and you get some results that are amp pages accelerated mobile pages all that's going on is that the page is being pre fetched so when you click on the page it's going to load instantly because the page is actually already loaded on your phone and the reason it can do that is because amp pages are conforming to a specific

format that is easier to cash and prefetch and have predictable performance characteristics so the criticisms are often that amp centralizes pages around being served from Google search or some other confused accusation towards Google like that but amp does not necessarily centralize pages around being served from Google search another good example