HTML5 Live London 2011

Hello team, good morning.

I am going to resume all what I got from the day at Html5 london 2011.

I am not going to write a long long tedious to read email, just let me present the main ideas and links.

Note: Amazing talk of Bruce Lawson: (do not miss the chance to go to one of his talks)

- HTML5 plan: "All company should at least have a html5 plan on the table for the next 6 to 12 months". Market is moving so fast an all big companies are on board to push html5.

- Possible to use: Certainly, html5 spec is not finish yet. However there are a lot of things ready to use. Web site to check what is available to use "caniuse" For things that are not ready to use there are usually walk around like JS libraries Modernizr . Or projects like Polyfills.

- Html5 forms demo: From Bruce Lawson, Opera engineer. Here there are a lot of test to learn from. http://brucelawson.co.uk/tests/

- WebRTC project: is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimise to best serve this purpose.

- Quake II with GWT: The Quake II GWT port brings the 3d gaming experience of Quake II to the browser.

- Websockets: The WebSocket specification—developed as part of the HTML5 initiative—introduced the WebSocket JavaScript interface, which defines a full-duplex single socket connection over which messages can be sent between client and server. The WebSocket standard simplifies much of the complexity around bi-directional web communication and connection management.

- Kaazing documentation, Kaazing is the main company creating and supporting websockets technology.

- Gaming protocols on top of websockets:

+ Stomp is a simple text-orientated messaging protocol. It defines an interoperable wire format so that any of the available Stomp Clients can communicate with any Stomp Message Broker to provide easy and widespread messaging interoperability among languages, platforms and brokers. (text content)

+ AMQP is an open Internet protocol standard for message-queueing communications. (binary content)

- Websockets site example: http://kaazing.me/

- Recommended book from kaazing engineers: http://www.prohtml5.com/

- WebGL: WebGL brings 3D graphics to the Web by introducing an API that closely conforms to OpenGL ES 2.0 that can be used in HTML5 canvas elements. Support for WebGL is present in Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 9.

- Html5Rocks.com: Html5 resources for developers.

- Html5 boilerplate: Best practises and help to start creating new html5 projects in the right direction.

- PhoneGap: "is an HTML5 mobile framework that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best... HTML and JavaScript.
It is a standard framework to develop web apps (mobile) for the main platforms iOS, Android, Blackberry, ..."

The framework works with the main IDEs,  the XCode more for iOS development. Eclipse, more oriented to develop Android apps. And also with Dreamweaver CS5 for Blackberry.
Even the app in html5 should be compatible for any device, it is still required to know very well for which device will be developed the app. And it is recommended to customise behaviour for each device.


Summary of the main three topics for Tools team:

+ Gaming on mobile: PhoneGap looks like the best option nowadays to develop games and apps for mobile. Html5 have handy CSS3 styles that dynamically adjusts the styles to the screen size. However in the talk of Kevin Hoyt I got the main idea that the apps and so games are not easy to export to different platforms. (mobile devices) Because each device have special way to work and specific buttons. It is possible but, it is up to the developers to fully test with each device to adapt the app/game behaviour the each device.

Html5 brings fancy tools to enable offline apps/games. The user should not need to know if the device is connected or not. While being offline the app/game can use local browser storage DBs or local resources to allow the user keep playing or using the application.


+ Presentation layer & Web Services: I think there is plenty of things ready to use about creating apps in html5. About WebSockets it looks very interesting and powerful for Web services communications using Rest technologies. Restlet for example is still under development about using websockets, but is coming soon I think. Playfish could use existing protocols or even define new protocols on top of Websockets.

+ Tools for testing and automation: Unfortunately there is nothing extra about testing or automation in Html5. What can be a good point for Playfish/EA to push a new spec about testing and automation. I will write an email soon to see if we can do a brainstorming about this area and maybe present a new initial point for a new spec.

That is all folks.

Kind regards,


Posted by Marc Andreu Fernandez.