Exclusive interview with Qu Yi, Senior Technical Director of Qilekang: Notepad, Code and Crow5

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Qu Yi: Senior Technical Director of Qilekang. He has worked as an architect, senior technical manager, technical director and other positions in Internet companies such as Gaoyang, Kongzhong, and Lefeng. He has been focusing on mobile Internet for the past four years. He is a senior HTML5 expert and researcher in China. He has a very deep understanding of HTML5 technology and rich practical experience. He is the creator of HTML5 engine Crow5.

Many programmers want to become technology experts, so they start to actively learn knowledge from various forums and blogs. Later, they also write blogs themselves, and then read foreign technical blogs and translate foreign literature... In fact, sometimes we just need to focus on the matter itself - writing good code. In Facebook's interview, there is a session called whiteboard programming, where a pen, a whiteboard, and a question bring programming back to its original state. However, when my friend picked up the pen and wrote down *** [], he gave up and said, "This is uncomfortable, very uncomfortable." As the functions of code editors become more and more powerful and complete, highlighting and completion have become the norm. In this case, if you want to write an engine by hand, it is enough to discourage most people.

Crow5 Engine

Lefeng.com is a well-known domestic e-commerce website. Its mobile terminals such as Android, iPhone, iPad and m.lefeng.com all have the shadow of Crow5.

Crow5 engine consists of more than 40 plug-ins and modules, among which the more important modules are HTML code convention module, interaction extraction module, data encapsulation module, data drive module, encryption obfuscation module, plug-in manager, accelerator, URL interceptor, animation controller, cache controller, timeout listener, template controller, request sending management module, on-demand loading manager. The processing mechanisms mainly include dozens of processing mechanisms such as convention programming mechanism, data drive mechanism, template engine drift mechanism, heartbeat maintenance mechanism, etc.

On the technical level, Android, iPhone and webapp, which had to be developed independently, used to require three languages ​​and three teams to develop. After adopting the engine technology, you only need to write a webapp in the way of the engine. The engine will automatically adapt to Android and iPhone developers without having to over-consider language issues, reducing the manpower investment in development. In terms of maintenance, you only need to maintain one version to cover all platforms and update synchronously, and you don’t need to send out packages. Since the engine adopts the agreed design mode, you don’t need to type too much when writing code. You only need to write the configuration file according to the agreement, and the code will be automatically generated by the engine. This greatly simplifies development. And there is no need to consider the writing style.

Such an engine was born entirely in Notepad.

Crow5 was born from a notepad

As time goes by, people's memories and many things will be forgotten. Some things will be completely forgotten once they are put aside for a long time, but once an action is formed, the memory will become solid.

Qu Yi, senior technical director of Qilekang and author of Crow5 engine, told the author, "When he was in college, the school had a mandatory requirement not to buy computers in the first and second years of college. It was at that time that he developed the habit of copying books and memorizing codes. This not only made the basic skills more solid, but also made the sensitivity and efficiency of bug checking very high. If you use tools, you just have to wait for the results of the tools. For a long time, using Notepad, you can think completely by eyes."

Although Qu Yi likes or is used to writing code in Notepad, the original intention of Crow5 is to write less code. Many programmers may have this feeling: they have made a lot of pages, although each page is different, but the content is basically the same, and they have done a lot of repetitive work.

Qu Yi told the reporter: "I find it very painful to write repeated code. Do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you. This is exactly the original intention of my developing the Crow5 engine."

In addition, if someone who has worked in Java for many years learns JS, there will be many aspects that are difficult to adapt to. For example, Java is block-level, while JS is function-level. So he began to think about how to let a backend person write JS, which is also the significance of the Crow5 engine.

Inspiration comes from life

As mentioned above, the Crow5 engine processing mechanisms mainly include dozens of processing mechanisms, such as the agreed programming mechanism, data-driven mechanism, template engine drift mechanism, heartbeat maintenance mechanism, etc. Just like Rilke's long poem "Duino Elegies" was started in 1912, but only two or three poems were written, and it was put aside for 10 years until February 1922, when it seemed to wake up overnight and was completed within a month. To realize more than a dozen processing mechanisms, you also need to wait for inspiration to come.

Qu Yi mentioned: "It's not that magical. In fact, there are many times when I don't know what to do, just like the heartbeat maintenance mentioned earlier. When I was watching "Animal World", it happened to talk about frogs hibernating and waking up at a certain appropriate time. So when I was designing it, I didn't keep requesting the server. When there is no network, there is no network, and the request is useless. So when the user clicks and finds that there is a network, wake up. This is the most scientific and efficient way and saves the most traffic."

Just like it is never the big companies that change the world, Crow5 was originally intended to be used by itself and then promoted within the team on a small scale. Now, as Crow5 is widely used in actual work, Qu Yi also plans to continue to improve Crow5. He told reporters: "In fact, people are lazy by nature, and the same is true for programming. It used to be very complicated to make a forum, but now it only takes the next step. Therefore, I hope Crow5 can become a framework that has little learning cost and can be used by anyone."

Conclusion

As the functions of code editors continue to improve, many articles similar to "Ten Reasons Not to Program in TXT" have appeared on the Internet. Here I would like to borrow a sentence from the poet Bei Dao: "What we regard as a prosperous age may be a wrong path in the eyes of others."