DevUp 2012 - Barcelona

Last Friday I went to DevUp 2012 in Barcelona. The event focused on HTML5, but interestingly for me it mixed two different development communities. As well as web developers there is a whole world of games developers who are embracing HTML5 or more precisely Canvas. Darius Kazemi from bocoup did a talk which made a side-by-side comparison of the web and games development culture. As a games developer in a JavaScript company he had some nice insights.

I missed Javier Usobiaga talk on Responsive Web Design, which is a shame, but managed to go to the session by Ibon Tolosana on CocoonJS. It takes HTML5 canvas based games and boosts their performance by using an OpenGL ES execution environment. Through the day a recurring theme seemed to be that the current performance of Canvas on phones is just under what the gaming community are looking for. Although like petrol-heads I feel they will always want just a few extra frames per a second. The best example of this was Miguel Ángel Pastor’s talk on cross compiling JavaScript from C++. Not an approach I would take, but interesting.

I hope people found my talk “Beyond the page” on API’s of interest. The Web Intents demo did not work, although I am in good company as Paul Kinlan had the same trouble when he visited Barcelona. Maybe adding that one last demo at 1am the night before was not a good idea! Next time I am going to have backup screencasts.

The PeopleStore HTML5 app I showed on the day is unfortunately not online, but the codebits area of my site does have demos/code of some of the API’s it uses.

• Building a virtual file and creating a download link
• Creating a virtual file that can be dragged off the browser
• Copy and paste data between pages
• Custom protocol handlers

Sorry the video does not show the demo’s there is an earlier screencast of some of these demo’s from a previous blog post.

I would like to thank Ideateca for inviting me to speak and putting on such a good event, the live translation services and high quality video which was streamed live added to the events success.