Facebook has made an important new hire, bringing in a head of mobile developer relations to help steer the company’s mobile ecosystem in what is sure to be a huge growth period over the next several years. James Pearce, formerly in charge of developer relations at Sencha, has accepted the job and leaving the framework company today, according to post on his personal blog.
Bringing in a person like Pearce is a very clear indication of where Facebook would like to go with its mobile platform. To understand where Facebook wants to go you have to know where it, and Pearce, have been.
Sencha is a framework provider for HTML5 mobile Web development. Its primary product, Sencha Touch, is an environment to create Web apps for Android and iOS devices. Sencha, like many of the mobile tools and framework providers this year, has been very busy keeping up with the rapid pace of mobile innovation and providing new utilities to make developers lives easier.
“The best way to relate to developers is to be a developer. I try to spend as much time as possible writing code myself so that I really know for myself what works, what doesn’t, and what the frustrations are,” Pearce said in an email to ReadWriteWeb. “But since I’ve been writing code since I was a kid, this is actually the part I most enjoy.”
For an example, here are some prominent Sencha stories we covered this year.
- Sencha Announces Cloud Environment for Mobile Web HTML5 Developers
- Sencha Attempts to Revolutionize Mobile Animations
- Sencha Updates HTML5 Framework to Work with Android and iOS Device APIs
- Sencha Touch Charts Bring Data Visualization to Mobile Web
The types of things that Pierce is likely to focus on with Facebook developers will revolve around these particular topics. HTML5 Web app creation environments that make it easier for developers to develop dynamic Web apps that will be tied to both the browser and Facebook’s notion of the social graph.
Sencha is totally awesome – and really helping to define what an HTML5 world will look
like (for both mobile & desktop contexts),” Pearce said. “Working for Facebook will be a new & exciting chapter in my life. I suspect I’ll have a lot of exciting mobile things to work on. I’m looking forward to continue working with developers worldwide as they bring the possibilities of mobile to life!”
Pierce writes an informative blog called Tripleodeon. He published a post yesterday that breaks down developer problems with mobile screen sizes, one of the biggest headaches for developers in the industry working on Android and HTML5 projects. Here are a couple of other posts from Pierce that capture his approach to mobile development.
If you missed our coverage of Facebook’s roadmap and strategy for mobile this year, you will notice that what the type of approach that Sencha is taking towards creating a dynamic HTML5 Web app environment is closely aligned with Facebook’s goals.
