Live From HTML5DevConf

Earlier this week the 5th annual HTML5DevConf was held in the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

The conference has grown rapidly in the last several years and is evident by the large number of attendees and sessions.

Crowd during HTML5DevConf's opening keynote. Image via https://twitter.com/amybarton/status/392686434273861632

Sessions

As the conference was large - 100+ speakers and sessions - it's nearly impossible to cover even a small segment of the content presented; therefore I'll only discuss a few talks stood out to me.

• Douglas Crockford gave a talk on how programming practices are established titled "Which Way is Forward". In it he discussed the history of programming constructs such as the goto statement, number types, type systems, and functional programming.
• Arno Gourdol showed off some of Adobe's tools like their CSS framework - TopCoat. Adobe also revealed a new tool for building SVG from JavaScript - snap.svg. The demos were amazing and hopefully a sign of what's to come with svg on the web.
• Paul Trani gave a talk on easy to use usability titled "10 Easy-To-Implement Usability Findings". The talk was entertaining because Paul showed recordings of actual usability tests to prove the individual points he was making.
• Darcy Clarke gave a talk titled "W3C's Web Content & Creative Constraints" (slides). In it he covered a lot of the cutting edge specs to help present content - flex box, box-sizing, calc(), filters, masks, and more. The most interesting aspect was work he's doing on implementing responsive video for mobile by decoding video in JavaScript and presenting it in a canvas.

Douglas Crockford presenting "Which Way is Forward". Image via https://twitter.com/acolchado/status/393080333379198976

My Talk

I gave a talk on HTML5 form validation titled "Constraint Validation - Native Client Side Validation for Web Forms". In it I discussed HTML's constraint validation specification and what is means for web developers.

If you're interested in learning more, checkout the slides; hopefully, video of the talk will be available at some point.

What About Icenium

What does any of this have to do with Icenium? Building hybrid apps was a huge topic of discussion at HTML5DevConf, showing that this is a common problem web developers are trying to solve. Checkout this impressive list of talks focused on some aspect of hybrid app development.

• Write once, deploy to multiple mobile platforms
• Environmental Sensors for Making app on phone
• PhoneGap and Backbone.js
• Web/Native: Blurring the Lines Between the Two
• Creating High Performance Mobile Apps with HTML5
• Getting Started with PhoneGap and Cross-Platform Mobile Development
• Creating Cross Platform games with one HTML5 Code Base
• Optimizing HTML5 for Distribution on Mobile Devices
• Wrapping Your HTML5 with Native Wrappers
• Design, Build and Deploy Cross-Platform
• HTML5 Mobile Apps Don't Have To Suck
• Designing and Architecting PhoneGap and Mobile Web App
• Augmented Reality Mobile App Development
• Making money with HTML/JavaScript Windows Store applications
• Building Native Apps with HTML5
• Introduction to PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build

Hopefully videos and slides of these talks will be posted online by the conference. If so, I'll link them up here.

With features such as cloud based builds, LiveSync and Ion, we feel that Icenium is the best solution available for simplifying the process of hybrid app development on the web. We'll continue to work towards making hybrid app development seamless for web developers.

Wrapping Up

HTML5DevConf was a well organized event with a fantastic lineup of speakers and sessions. It continues to grow and bring in the best and brightest from the industry. I highly recommend the conference for anyone trying to keep up with the latest and greatest in the web development world.