In early 2010, I had just finished up a workflow proof-of-concept project and was poking around other projects at Applied Information Sciences, looking for what was next in my software career. Since I had some Silverlight experience and wanted to expand it further, I requested a role on a project to enhance a magazine viewer originally produced by Vertigo (vertigo.com) for Bondi Digital (BondiDigital.com). I ended up rebuilding the processing software that imported the source images and data into the viewer format. This was fortuitous because it was a project role that would continue while many others rotated in and out over the next two years.

When the processing solution was complete, I got involved in the Silverlight area of the application, and it was about this time that Apple’s new toy, the iPad, took off. It seemed to the project stakeholders that an HTML-only version of our viewer would be appropriate, so we got to work. For a traditional ASP.NET and Silverlight developer like me, this was new ground, and it took a number of months and hundreds of dollars in books for me to get my footing with JavaScript and to unlearn all the bits and pieces of ASP.NET that hide the true nature of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

With a little knowledge and the help of other AIS employees who were working with Manning Publications on various book ideas, I got Mike Stephens’ name and called over to discuss a book proposal on Silverlight and GIS, my hobby and one of my technology passions. We were pretty close to writing up a book contract when a Microsoft employee happened to mention in an interview that they (MS) were “refocusing” Silverlight. This came as a shock to all of the Silverlight developers and client companies who had been investing heavily in the technology for rich client-side web solutions.

Despite some backtracking and spinning the news, this appears to have been a correct 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 format. The initial idea, when I was the sole author, was to build a single application that integrated HTML5 APIs 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 experienced 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 excellent 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.

The format you find within these pages is our collective attempt to find the friendliest, fastest route from .NET developer to HTML5/JavaScript expert. Most of the text, server-side code, and JavaScript code comments you will find here are my words, and most of the JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is Ian’s work.

We hope that you find the contents informative and interesting. More importantly, we hope that our book gives you great ideas for fantastic and fun new software products. If you have an interesting project that you’d like to make some noise about, feel free to contact me at jim@axshon.net.