The Rise and Rise of HTML5

The rise of HTML5 seemed inevitable in the early months of 2012, not in the sense of a decade - since - today inevitably rather had here - tomorrow aplomb. In the same year, in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped this gem in an industry conference: "The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 in native contrast just was not ready.”Coming a few months after the disastrous IPO Facebook, was a declaration.

When Zuckerberg has said that HTML5 is not ready for prime time, engineers from all sectors realized. But the question turned out to be temporary.

Last year, streaming video giant Netflix announced that it was changing from the programming language of Microsoft Silverlight for HTML5. After Microsoft announced it was ending support for Silverlight in 2021, the situation has become a dead man walking. In 2011, Adobe announced that Flash left for web browsers on mobile devices, because Apple has chosen to be compatible with iOS.

For all intents and purposes, Silverlight and Flash are now dead to the world of finance. When you are the only viable player left in the field, is a natural inevitability. In 2014, it would be difficult to find a major investment bank or asset manager who has some HTML5 development programs underway.

For browser-based business applications, portals and distribution of furniture for the customer, or indigenous HTML5 development remain the only two options for companies in the capital markets with a hybrid strategy gaining much of the day. The barricades remain, but recent updates to the browser, and the proliferation of open source tools make it clear that the industry is entering a new era of development that traders further untie their desks.

The Favorite

The main advantage of HTML5 is that it is device independent and supports all classes of business portals. Users can reuse the code of all devices, and developers can work on projects across devices. Mazy Dar, CEO of OpenFin, which provides run-time technologies for desktop and mobile devices Financial, says that while HTML5 is not a magic wand, does not allow financial firms to build an application once and run through both mobile and desktop platforms.

“It took some time to get to this point, but it is believed that at the end of 2013 and 2014 was not a turning point," said Dar. "You can start getting in the way of new technology stack that you want, such as HTML5 or extend an existing platform. Problem of extending an existing platform is that it is the work that is being done today that you know you will have to emigrate in the near term.”

Last year OpenFin helped a premier bank to build a new platform using HTML5 single bag. Chief Technology Officer of the bank, who was not authorized to discuss the project on disk, said that in the past the company would go with Silverlight or Flash, but because its support is finite, HTML5 has become the ' only logical option.

"In the future, all development should be done via HTML, because it has almost all the features that you want," says the CTO. “There’s not much more sense to use these legacy platforms. Having been in similar projects with other banks over the past six or seven years, it certainly makes sense that most of the banks are taking right now. "

The organization uses the CTO OpenFin to bridge the gap between the browser and the desktop functionality around desktop notifications, native integration of multi -window prices, placement, layout and characteristics of downsizing, and "skin" program that is branded in a way that is compatible with other applications of the bank.

The CTO said that the only arguments for not using HTML5 are the limitations of the browser and the ability to do that kind of language quite quickly, although “more or less completely closed.”

The other reason to take the path of the HTML5 platform for exchange only for the open source community has matured a lot in recent years, especially through the use of chromium, a proposed open source web browser.

"If you go back three years, there have been many excellent open source products in the space of JavaScript code," says CTO. “Now smaller companies are providing tools that did not exist a few years ago.”

Faster, Smarter

Paul Caplin, CEO of Caplin Systems, specializing in web technology trade says that HTML5 was revolutionary when it comes to development and support. While building native applications is still viable , when it comes to building mobile applications, the speed of development and ease of support have proved decisive in opting for HTML5 native or other languages.

" When it comes to mobile devices, even if you look at iOS and Android, there are many different flavors of Android that support native applications for each of them and is becoming a nightmare ," says Caplin . "It is very costly for the supplier to produce and test applications that run on all the different platforms that people have. How do you get to the emerging markets, which becomes more and truer? ‘S Promise of HTML5 that being achieved and faster than we expected, is that it works at all. Believe that people is surprised by how quickly it has become reality. "

David Saul, chief scientist of State Street, said that the adoption of HTML5 will only increase as the endpoint applications to add capacity and intelligence.

“HTML5 is a good step forward for our browser-based, in terms of capacity. Believe applications, however, it really is the final game in the end applications," he says. "Tomorrow we will have more computing power in refrigerators used to have in the data center 20 years ago. Due to the fact that you now have that level of processing an endpoint, applications and mobile devices are where is, “and why he is an agnostic HTML5 device will become the preferred programming language.

Still Some Immaturity

Negative comments Zuckerberg on HTML5 are not entirely unfounded, however. For example, older browsers still lack language support. According Give OpenFin , Internet Explorer 8, which support see end of this year, only 25 percent support and IE9 , which is common on Wall Street , which is just under 66 percent . While Chrome is 97 percent support, banks do not want to have to support two different browsers and tend to support only Internet Explorer or Safari.

When it comes to the user experience for commercial applications incorporating HTML5, even a browser that is 100 percent compatible , pop- ups are blocked, push notifications are not supported , and real-time integration of Microsoft Excel and integration with any native application on the user's desktop are not supported. Security is also a constant concern.

Mutual fund giant Vanguard Group, which oversees about $ 2 billion in assets, has adopted HTML5. But there are still limitations, as Dennis Becton, IT manager of the company.

Vanguard decided to go with an app platform Eclipse Foundation HTML5 in certain situations when it comes to mobile access, Becton said, adding that there are limitations with HTML5 browser, a commonly cited drawback.

Becton also notes that websockets - connections that remain open in HTML5 browsers and pass information back and forth in time yet the sector - are mature. HTML5 is still evolving when it comes to storing data in a browser and real-time interaction of the end user, Becton adds.

"Many times we choose native HTML5 for mobile applications due to performance and user experience rationale, despite the performance reasons it is becoming less of an issue," he explains.

Another potential pitfall of using HTML5 and JavaScript is that because they do not have the same kind of rigorous data as a true object-oriented language , and because they do not enforce a hierarchy of specific classes in terms of how the code is organized, is relatively easy to make a mess of things , says Dar.

Too Flexible

Developers can really make a mess of things easily, according to SunGard CTO Steve Silberstein, because HTML5 and JavaScript are “very flexible”.

Besides the above concerns the browser, Silberstein HTML5 adds that the market is still trying to catch up when it comes to tools.

“Tooling is probably one of the weakest areas of HTML5," he says. “This is an area with a high rate of growth, and SunGard see a lot of new development tools that make emerging HTML5 and JavaScript coding more efficient , but still a very fluid space . "

Trading Technologies , a provider of forward trading - end headquartered in Chicago, announced in March that it was phasing out the use of desktop X_TRADER of trade in favor of one based on software as a platform - a- service ( SaaS ) called Nextrader , built using HTML5.

Rick Lane, CEO of Trading Technologies (TT), says this is because the seller can get the same fluidity and response times, as you can in a Windows desktop application. While this was reasonable for a trading application based on the browser, when it comes to mobile functionality, TT chose native applications.
“We made the decision early enough that although there are many applications of HTML5 phone out there, we felt we would be sacrificing the user experience and performance," says Lane. “And 'certainly a bit more expensive upfront, but the user experience will benefit from going native.”

How HTML5 will solve these obstacles, however, will only be more vital as a mobile option as it is an agnostic device says Marshall Saffer, COO of MIK Fund Solutions, which recently downloaded Silverlight in favor of HTML5 for their user interfaces.

With HTML5, Saffer says the company has to write only once in the development of desktop applications and then move that functionality in addition to tablets and smartphones. This ease of portability makes it a necessary investment now than later.

"When it comes to furniture, if you are using HTML5, people are missing the bigger point," he says. "The only way to survive is to rewrite these things and that takes time and money.”

According to State Street Saul worldwide, 15,000 new mobile applications are written and 17 million apps are downloaded every day. With this level of consumption, the ability to move through devices that HTML5 will cinch.

"This type of bike will be relentless," says Saul. “We’ve certainly seen our customers, who want access to tablet devices and want to be able to move with them and not be locked”

The Future, and Beyond

Vanguard has adopted a phased approach for the adoption of HTML5. For the rest of this year and in 2015, Becton says the company will look to see if it makes sense to adopt JavaScript on the server side, such as the use of Node.js, built in JavaScript runtime Chrome, which allows users to create network applications.
"This would make it even more interesting HTML5 solutions, we would be using the same language on the client and server," said Becton.

Vanguard will also examine ways to add support for automated testing and static code analysis, local storage and AngularJS maybe even the adoption of an open source JavaScript framework, offering enriched customer experiences, he says.

To ensure that the development of HTML5 to make even more closely within the capital markets, further improvements must be made about the browser and barriers around mobile functionality must be overcome.
Observations Zuckerberg in September 2012 on HTML5 were justified. But he never said that HTML5 is not the wave of the future, only Facebook has gone all-in in the language too early in its evolution.

When it comes to business applications and mobile access to them, a hybrid approach combining native and HTML5 applications has proven to be the most popular route to date. But if you still are held in Silverlight and Adobe, it's just a matter of time until they will be forced to join the rest of the competitors in the shopping HTML5.

Salient Points

• One key sticking point of HTML5 adoption is the fact that older Internet Explorer browsers—still ubiquitous on Wall Street—are, at best, only two-thirds compliant with the programming language. But as firms increasingly upgrade their browsers to newer models, those stumbling blocks will be remedied.
• HTML5 is device-agnostic, which allows firms to develop once and then use that code across tablet and smartphone devices.
• By switching to HTML5, development and support become easier because of the language’s portability to other devices.
• Still, challenges remain, especially when it comes to push notifications and integration with Microsoft Excel applications and other native apps.