Programming HTML5 Applications: Building Powerful Cross-platform Environments in JavaScript

Zachary Kessin first discovered the world wide web around 1993 when NCSA Mosaic was still the dominant browser. He has been building applications on the internet around 1995 when perl and CGI were the way to go. He has worked in the Boston Area, London, and Tel Aviv. He currently works at Mytopia a leading social games company in Ramat Gan Israel. Mytopia builds games for Facebook and mobile. Zachary's main responsibility is to build an internal Dashboard, a single page Javascript application that is used to manage many aspects of Mytopia operations. The dashboard started about 2 1/2 years ago as an old style web application, where all logic was done in PHP and every action required a page load. Over the first year it evolved from there threw several phases into a single page application, in which all functionality is in one web page and only login and logout require a page load. About 2 years ago we started using Google Gears to speed up the Dashboard. At some point after google stopped developing gears we have started moving those features over to HTML 5. At this point the dashboard uses localStorage, Canvas, and the HTML5 application Cache. There was some use of Gears Worker Pool as well. The Dashboard is based on ExtJS and jQuery.