Dou Jingbo of Suning.com: The evolution of mobile clients

On August 26-27, 2016, the [WOT2016 Mobile Internet Technology Summit] hosted by 51CTO.com was held in Beijing JW Marriott Hotel. Since 2012, the WOT brand conference has been successfully held for 11 sessions with the concept of focusing on technology and serving technical personnel. It has not only accumulated a large number of expert resources, but also won the recognition and praise of IT practitioners and technology enthusiasts, and has become an important technology sharing and network expansion platform in the industry.

At the conference, the reporter interviewed Dou Jingbo, the head of mobile technology at Suning.com, and asked him to talk about the development and growth of the mobile client.

Speaking of Suning.com, everyone is familiar with it. We often shop in Suning stores or on Suning.com's website and APP. With the rapid development of mobile Internet, Suning.com's mobile users are also growing rapidly. Currently, Suning has 180,000 employees, 1,600 stores in 300 cities, and more than 250 million members. Today, Suning.com adopts a combination of online marketing and offline physical sales.

Suning.com's mobile client began to be developed in 2009. At that time, Suning's online business volume was relatively small, and the entire development work of the mobile client was completed by only one department, which only required connecting all business modules.

As the number of users gradually increases, the functions carried by the mobile client are also increasing. At present, the business stack of Suning.com APP includes different modules such as customer service, wallet, Jigu, community, Hi Shopping, and small stores. With the increase of functions, problems also follow one after another: increasing maintenance costs, low compilation efficiency, increasing APK size, and lower communication efficiency...

During the evolution of the entire mobile client, the biggest problem Suning.com encountered was communication and collaboration. As the business volume gradually increased, the functional development of different modules was scattered in different departments, and how to communicate effectively became the biggest problem. Therefore, Dou Jingbo's team began to improve the architecture of the mobile client by dividing business functions into modules and basic functions into components. By providing basic components and overall architecture for business module developers to use, and providing complete specification documents, most of the development problems were solved, and feedback would be provided in a timely manner if there were any problems.

How to ensure that the APP can be more fully tested and reduce bugs in production is the second biggest problem. In the second half of this year, Suning began to try domestic third-party testing platforms and also established its own testing platform to establish complete automated test cases, make business modifications and update them in a timely manner.

In the past, everyone focused on the Internet and used PCs to connect. Today, everyone has mobile devices such as mobile phones and Pads, and more time online is spent on mobile Internet. So, in the development process from traditional PC to mobile, it is not enough to just move the PC to the mobile terminal. Dou Jingbo told reporters that first of all, people who make product demands need to change their thinking, because the interactive experience on the mobile terminal is completely different from that on the PC, and there must also be a change of thinking on the server and APP sides. The common practice on the PC side is to make principled structural calls, but on the APP, due to network limitations, the packet loss rate principle is not applicable on the APP.

In terms of mobile openness, there are three development modes, namely Web development, native development, and hybrid development. Web development has relatively low costs, simple maintenance and updates, strong cross-platform capabilities, and does not require version review and installation and deployment, but the user experience is relatively poor; while native development has a relatively high user experience, but the development cost is relatively high, maintenance and updates are relatively complex, and version review and user installation and deployment are also required. Hybrid development is between Web openness and native development, combining the advantages of native development's good user interaction experience with Web development's cross-platform development advantages.

So, how should developers choose? Dou Jingbo pointed out that when developers first start to develop APP, they may want to launch it quickly, so they will use H5 hybrid development, but this method will have a certain loss of user experience, especially in some business scenarios with more interactions. Developers should adopt different methods according to different business forms. Suning.com will also adopt different development methods according to different business modules. For example, the shopping cart, transaction, payment and other modules adopt a purely native development method; promotional activities and display content mostly adopt hybrid development.

An APP carries many functions. Once the members involved in the original development have personnel changes, or take on other functions, or there is no technical documentation, it is difficult for the person who takes over to intervene quickly. Therefore, Dou Jingbo also recommends that developers have a certain level of technical documentation writing ability.

Dou Jingbo believes that the future development trend of mobile Internet will gradually develop towards dynamic and cross-platform development. "How to quickly launch business functions without upgrading the entire App, and how developers can also take into account multiple mobile phone platforms is the future development trend of mobile Internet."

The above is a wonderful report from 51CTO.com reporters from the front line of the [WOT2016 Mobile Internet Technology Summit]. Please continue to pay attention to more exciting content!