}
Client: Intel
Intel was constructing a new semiconductor fabrication plant, and needed a way to monitor mission-critical industrial processes across a fleet of machines deployed around the globe.
Intel brought The Pixel Division onboard for our frontend and visualization engineering expertise. We architectured and built a frontend combining a dashboard, real-time data visualization, monitoring, anomaly detection, alerting, and system metrics search engine.
From the beginning of the project, we faced a challenging operational requirement: The entire frontend had to run in Internet Explorer 8…in 2016.
IE8 is a >10-year-old web browser with JavaScript tech that severely lagged the state-of-the-art – even in the era when it was originally released. To say that it it’s difficult to deliver an advanced real-time web application with complex data visualizations on the IE8 platform is an understatement.
But the IE8 target was an operational constraint that could not be eased. So we found a way to make it work while minimizing tradeoffs.
It quickly became clear that we needed a careful, deliberate approach… We researched IE8 thoroughly, mapped out its deficiencies, and prototyped every failure scenario. We identified a few key problem areas that affected the app’s requirements, and others that required careful workarounds.
Some of the problems IE8 introduced by include: extremely limited debugging support, cryptic error messages, a fixed upper-limit to the number of JavaScript instructions that can be executed per ‘step’ (!?), memory leaks, and much worse.
We devised an architecture that let us deliver an advanced, modern SPA on top of the limited IE8 browser tech. Our approach let us leverage many modern Javascript frameworks and compilers, which made development faster and more enjoyable for the whole team.
We methodically tested aspects of the architecture and refined them based on experimental results. This approach gathered important performance data that we used in development and to clearly communicate the risks & costs of the IE8 requirement to key stakeholders.
Despite all the challenges, we delivered a modern SPA by applying a innovative architecture and careful software engineering practices.
This project is unique because it’s the rare one where the frontend is feature complete before the backend. There were no surprises, and no gotchas - because we planned for them upfront.
The result of all that deliberation and careful engineering was a modern frontend with state-of-the-art tooling running on an ultra-legacy platform, all in service of the mission: helping Intel ship chips.