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PREFACE
xviii
Despite some backtracking and spinning the news, this appears to have been a cor-
rect move on Microsoft’s part. While Silverlight is certainly not dead, it has been
eclipsed by
HTML5
in terms of industry hype and project work moving forward. For
web consultancies, this is not such a huge problem, because
ASP
.
NET
MVC
is a top-tier
platform on which to build rich client-side
HTML
applications. Windows 8 allows
HTML
/
CSS
and JavaScript as first-class development languages for native software! It’s
not a panacea, but it is a great tool to have in the belt.
While all of this was happening in the industry, I became more involved in the new
HTML
version of the magazine viewer application. And because the Silverlight/
GIS
book was clearly not going to fly in the marketplace, Mike at Manning asked what
other applications I was working on. I responded that we were building a rich
HTML5
client, integrating
ASP
.
NET
MVC
and deploying it to
SQL
Azure and Azure Web Roles.
“We could do a book about any of those things!” was Mike’s response. Of course,
I didn’t think I was nearly qualified enough to write such an authoritative tome, but
Mike convinced me that I was, in fact, in the perfect position to do so. As a seasoned
developer who had moved from strict
ASP
.
NET
and rich-client C# applications into
JavaScript and
HTML
, I was in a good position to describe the technologies from a
common perspective.
During the writing of this book we took a few detours to come to the current for-
mat. The initial idea, when I was the sole author, was to build a single application that
integrated
HTML5
API
s into a reference framework. This turned out to be a dead
end. The Microsoft Silk project was working on the same thing, only they had actual
members of the jQuery team looking over their shoulders and helping them out.
This was not a competitive position for our book, and Manning was not excited about
the idea of a single-project book; such books can lead to content that is more focused
on the project than on learning the technology. The next iteration led to the current
focus of one project per chapter and also to the realization that I was not experi-
enced enough to write what could be termed “reference-level” JavaScript code. The
manager on the magazine viewer project was lucky enough to find and contract with
Ian Gilman, and his expertise provided immediate improvements to that platform
and to our collective expertise in JavaScript. Ian is an expert technician and an excel-
lent communicator, so he was a natural choice for the project and for this book. He
also brought in the Git source control expertise. You can see our source repository at
www.github.com/axshon/
HTML
-5-Ellipse-Tours, where Ellipse Tours is the original
name of the single project.
The next version of the book was nearly complete in early 2012 when Manning
decided that a new development editor would be added to the project. With the
help of Renae Gregiore, Ian and I reworked the book to focus more on the use of
each
HTML5
API
, rather than providing deep reference material and then trying to
spend the last few pages of each chapter building a project with it. This final format
reduced the size of the book by moving the
MVC
-focused chapter and the JavaScript
chapter into appendices.