Javascript Fun at London Web Standards
Posted on by Steve Workman About 2 min reading time
Last night was London Web Standards' April 2011 event, Fun with JavaScript. Speakers Rob Hawkes of Mozilla and Seb Lee-Delisle of Plug-in Media came to talk about all the fun stuff you can do with JavaScript, canvas, and HTML5. Sketchnotes for both talks are below.
We were also joined by a man showing us a quick look at Dreamweaver CS5.5 with it's new HTML5 features. Unfortunately, the software had a few bugs which showed up in the talk, and after being burned by the very expensive adobe software for years, the crowd didn't take to the UI very well, which wasn't helped by a low-res projector. Still, it looks like a big improvement over the old version, but I'll still use Coda when on my Mac.
Rob Hawkes: multiplayer gaming in HTML5
Rob is a canvas and animation guru. He's not far out of uni and has a book out this month! He gave a new talk on multiplayer gaming, and how it was possible in HTML5.
Basically: Canvas + Websockets + a server (rob recommended Node.js) = multiplayer gaming on the web.
Rob didn't go into much detail as to how to do all this, just talked us through the principles of what you should be doing, what you should avoid, how to prevent cheating and simple tricks to improve performance.
At the end, Rob proposed a HTML5 gaming knowledge repository, a community wiki and tutorial site, so that it's easier for people to learn. Someone at the event will take him up on the offer, so look forward to more things soon!
Rob has a book on Foundation HTML5 Canvas: Gaming and Entertainment for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk
Seb Lee-Delisle: Fun with JavaScript
Seb is a flash guy, but also a JavaScript guy and a graphics guy. He's so multi-talented that he doesn't know what exactly he does any more.
Seb has won two BAFTAs (thanks for correcting me Seb!) for some of his BBC kids web sites. He personally runs a javascript graphics workshop and took us through a few things that we'd do if we went on it.
He started with particles, showing us how to do basic (pseudo) physics in canvas and JavaScript. He then broke out his large array of particle demos, showing how complex effects can be produced with very simple code.
Seb then talked about performance, and how bad canvas is at the moment. DOM elements with hardware acceleration is easily twice as fast as canvas, especially on the iPad. The iPad's saving grace is its touch screen, which can take 11 touch points (just in case we grow an extra finger). Seb created a simple asteroids game using touch events for input.
Seb finally talked about 3D and how using libraries was a great way to go from 2d to 3D very simply. He recommended Unity as a game engine and framework of choice, and they're building HTML5 renderers on top of their regular OpenGL and DirectX methods. Exciting stuff indeed.