HTML5 programming

Questions on how we spend our money and our time - consumer goods and services, home and vehicle, leisure and recreational activities
Post Reply
Topic Author
paulsiu
Posts: 1457
Joined: Sun Nov 16, 2008 6:46 pm

HTML5 programming

Post by paulsiu »

Fellow programmers, I notice some recent articles talking about Firefox OS where apps are programmed in HTML5. The idea is that instead of writing native apps, one can replace their functionality using HTML5. I imagine this to meant HTML + css + javascript. Has anyone out there play around with this? I was wondering how mature this technology in it and if it's worth looking into fun-wise and job-wise.

Paul
nordsteve
Posts: 1104
Joined: Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:23 am

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by nordsteve »

It's the same tech stack that is used for Windows 8, Chrome, and browser-based single page apps. The first uses of it date back almost a decade to Microsoft adding support for XML over HTTP as part of implementing Outlook Web Access, so it's not a new paradigm.
nhrdls
Posts: 108
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2013 5:14 pm

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by nhrdls »

HTML 5 is getting there. Most mobile apps (especially the apps that need to connect to remote site) do use html5 based technology. Site http://diveintohtml5.info/ has a good overview of many features specific to html5

HTML5 started catching up really fast when Steve Jobs decided that apple mobile devices won't be using flash, but will depend upon html5 for video rendering. Given popularity of the devices, many were forced to switch to html5. Even desktop browsers are catching up and most of them do support many basic features.
jackholloway
Posts: 1065
Joined: Mon Jul 08, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by jackholloway »

This is pretty much the tech stack for ChromeOS as well. You can do a lot, especially if you also have access to Canvas and WebGL.
KyleAAA
Posts: 9498
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:35 pm
Contact:

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by KyleAAA »

It's pretty mature and there are definite job prospects for this, mostly in the form of Node.js+Angular.js web apps.
User avatar
Kenkat
Posts: 9549
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:18 am
Location: Cincinnati, OH

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by Kenkat »

You can also use PhoneGap to turn web apps coded in HTML5/JavaScript/CSS into device specific native apps.

Easily create apps using the web technologies you know and love: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap is a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using standardized web APIs for the platforms you care about.

http://www.phonegap.com
freebeer
Posts: 2014
Joined: Wed May 02, 2007 8:30 am
Location: Seattle area USA

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by freebeer »

KyleAAA wrote:It's pretty mature and there are definite job prospects for this, mostly in the form of Node.js+Angular.js web apps.
Yes to the first part (getting mature and definite job prospects).

A minority of the job prospects involve the particular "full stack" of Node.js and Angular.js. It's a great stack but by no means the only or even most popular choice. Angular is somewhat criticized for a certain degree of "magic" (a la Ruby/Rails on the back end)... if you really want to understand how things work it's not necessarily the most transparent choice IMO.

Node is not yet the most popular server environment and whether you are doing HTML5 on the client side doesn't dictate any particular server environment, sure it's convenient to have JavaScript on both client and server but mostly in small teams where one developer does both, in larger teams the server-side aka "back end" and client-side aka "front end" are likely different people (and maybe totally different teams). Ruby/Rails, PHP, even Java are still more popular than Node. Only certain apps really benefit from Node's event-driven architecture.

Angular.js is definitely growing in popularity and is super clever but Backbone.js is still the most popular client-side framework and there's scads of others (Dojo, Ember, Meteor, Knockout, ...) http://todomvc.com/ shows the same app implemented with like 40 different frameworks. Depending on whether you are making a game or a corporate dashboard you may find a particular starting point framework/library better than others, or decide not to use any framework at all.

My guess is that if you polled "full stack" for HTML5 apps, Backbone/PHP would get #1 Backbone/Ruby #2. Just now in my metro Angular gets 55 hits on craiglist/jobs, Backbone 87. Node gets 54 hits, PHP 365, Ruby 215.
User avatar
Dinero
Posts: 307
Joined: Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:34 am

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by Dinero »

I wrote (and use) a portfolio tracking HTML5/CSS/PHP/JQuery app that I run locally (WampServer). Mostly as a hobby. I tinker with it from time to time. If you like this sort of thing, it is a blast (in a nerdy sort of way). By way of background, I learned programming with Turbo Pascal and 8086 assembly language. For fun. So others may want to take what I consider fun with a grain of salt.

Stack Overflow is your friend.

The HTML5 suite of tools/software is mostly free and online resources are usually quite good. Give it a try.
bstewartny
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue Dec 11, 2012 2:25 pm

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by bstewartny »

If you can focus on a single browser as your target, you can get very far using javascript+html+css. The trouble occurs when need to support more than one browser. For example, I've had really good results building "native"-seeming iOS apps (iPhone) using jQuery+css+javascript, using some javascript libraries such as handlebars to render dynamic templates to show different views of data, etc. Since I can focus on one single browser (in this case Safari mobile), I can take advantage of latest features in HTML (HTML5) and css (css3) and be confident it will work for all the users.
KyleAAA
Posts: 9498
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:35 pm
Contact:

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by KyleAAA »

bstewartny wrote:If you can focus on a single browser as your target, you can get very far using javascript+html+css. The trouble occurs when need to support more than one browser. For example, I've had really good results building "native"-seeming iOS apps (iPhone) using jQuery+css+javascript, using some javascript libraries such as handlebars to render dynamic templates to show different views of data, etc. Since I can focus on one single browser (in this case Safari mobile), I can take advantage of latest features in HTML (HTML5) and css (css3) and be confident it will work for all the users.
You can accomplish the same thing in almost all browsers using feature detection and shims. Of course, if somebody is using Internet Explorer 3 on Windows ME or something, you're probably screwed no matter what you do, but you can cover 99.5% of users in most cases.

Modernizr is a popular tool for doing this sort of thing.
User avatar
Kenkat
Posts: 9549
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2007 10:18 am
Location: Cincinnati, OH

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by Kenkat »

KyleAAA wrote:
bstewartny wrote:If you can focus on a single browser as your target, you can get very far using javascript+html+css. The trouble occurs when need to support more than one browser. For example, I've had really good results building "native"-seeming iOS apps (iPhone) using jQuery+css+javascript, using some javascript libraries such as handlebars to render dynamic templates to show different views of data, etc. Since I can focus on one single browser (in this case Safari mobile), I can take advantage of latest features in HTML (HTML5) and css (css3) and be confident it will work for all the users.
You can accomplish the same thing in almost all browsers using feature detection and shims. Of course, if somebody is using Internet Explorer 3 on Windows ME or something, you're probably screwed no matter what you do...
Or the current "bane" of HTML5 everywhere - Internet Explorer 8!
User avatar
rgb73
Posts: 60
Joined: Thu Jul 28, 2011 6:17 pm

Re: HTML5 programming

Post by rgb73 »

As other posters have mentioned, HTML5 is largely HTML+javascript+CSS. We are writing a web app at my current employer, using the DOJO javascript framework with a Microsoft C# backend. DOJO is really good and it takes care of a lot of the browser compatibility issues for you. We wrote a fully interactive image processing tool, and it even worked in IE 8. Must admit it was really slow in IE8 vs Chrome however.
Post Reply