Tag: HTML5

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Record and Playback Drawing in HTML5 Canvas – Part II

A reader of my blog post De/Serializing Recordings in Recordable HTML5 Canvas had asked me how to change stroke color and size when recording. I told him that this could be done by adding actions, like setColor and setStrokeSize. For more information about how the recordable canvas was implemented, see my blog post Record and Playback Drawing in HTML5 Canvas . I have updated the example with following new features –

  • Setting stroke color and size – both for drawing and recording
  • Pausing and resuming recording. You may want to pause recording if, for example, you do not want to record time delay when you select stroke color/size. Duration of time that the recording is paused is skipped when playing back the recording.

Here is the demo of how the new features work. Select a color by clicking on any color box on the right side of the canvas. Default selection is black. Currently selected color is displayed in a little bigger box with rounded corner. To select stroke size, I have added a few predefined circles of different sizes on the right side. Currently selected stroke size is displayed in black.

Continue reading “Record and Playback Drawing in HTML5 Canvas – Part II”

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My Experience of building UI of CFSummit2013 mobile app

I am back to writing blog after a gap of nearly two months. Past few weeks had been very busy working on new features of ColdFusion and creating a mobile app for CFSummit2013 . I along with my colleagues Asha and Rakshith had been working on this app for nearly a month, though not necessarily full time. There were two main reasons for building the app 1. to use mobile features of next ColdFusion releases to provide feedback and catch bugs 2. to create a useful app for the attendees of CFSummit.

I don’t know if attendees would find the app useful (I certainly hope so), but we were able to provide a lot of valuable feedback on ColdFusion mobile features and catch many bugs. The application took more time than it should have, because the mobile features of ColdFusion were still under developement. We would hit a bug and would have to wait (if it was a blocking issue) till it got fixed. In many case we did try to work around issues. But the whole process took a lot more time.

But this post is not about mobile features of ColdFusion and how they were used in the CFSummit app. I am going to talk about my experience in creating HTML5 UI for this app, the issues we faced and lessons learnt. Some of the UI issues are still unresolved.

Along with new mobile features of ColdFusion, this app is developed using JQuery, Bootstrap3, PathJS, JQuery Raty, Cordova (PhoneGap) and PhoneGap Build.

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Pre-packaging database with HTML5 Mobile Application

I was discussing with a couple of colleagues of mine yesterday about a HTML5 mobile application that we are developing, and one of the requirements was to pre-package database with the application. A few months back I had created an application that did just that. I thought the solution might be of interest to some of the readers of this blog.

Mobile (or for that matter non-mobile) browsers can create databases for your HTML5 applications. HTML5 provides APIs to create and access the database. But how do you pre-package the database?

The solution is  not really to pre-package the database, but package data that you want a database to initialize with. I don’t think you can really package a SQLite database and ask browser to use it for your HTML5 application. You need to create database and tables when the application is run the first time and then load data packaged with the application. Let’s say we want to create a table called ‘person’ and want to populate this table when the application is run the first time. Continue reading “Pre-packaging database with HTML5 Mobile Application”

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De/Serializing Recordings in Recordable HTML5 Canvas


Last year I blogged about creating a recordable HTML5 Canvas. I explained how to record strokes/drawings created on a HTML5 Canvas and play them back. There are a couple of comments on that post asking me to explain how to save recordings and load them back. Serialization and deserialization of recordings was on my to-do list for a long time and finally this week I got around to implement it. There are different ways to serialize and deserialize recordings, and I have implemented a simple method – using JSON. The serialized data is a bit verbose because of descriptive variable names I have used, but you can change that easily.

RecordableDrawing (in this script file) function remains unchanged. I have added a new file drawingSerializer.js . Two important functions in this file are serializeDrawing and deserializeDrawing.
serializeDrawing takes a RecordableDrawing object as argument and returns JSON string containing array of recordings.
deserializeDrawing takes a String (serialized data) as argument and returns array of Recording objects.

To see how serialization and deserialization works, follow these steps – Continue reading “De/Serializing Recordings in Recordable HTML5 Canvas”

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Record and Playback Drawing in HTML5 Canvas

A few months back I had created an application that recorded and played back drawings on HTML5 Canvas. For some time now I wanted to refactor the code in that application and create a reusable ‘component’ from it. Which is what I did this week.

Go ahead and try the demo first – Press ‘Record’ key below and then draw some strokes/lines in the box with the mouse (holding down left button). Once you are done, click Stop button. Click ‘Play’ button to play back the drawing you just drew. You can pause and resume too.

Continue reading “Record and Playback Drawing in HTML5 Canvas”

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Sprite Animation in HTML5 Canvas with KineticJS

If you want to simulate motion with repeated display of a set of images, where each image correspond to one position in a series of positions in motion, then you can do this easily with sprite. Sprite is individual image in this series of images that constitute motion. The example of sprite is a person walking, where his/her motions of hands and legs are repeated during the walk. However sprite animation is not limited to repeated motion only. You can simulate, for example, explosion of an object, with series of images (sprites), each showing different stages of the explosion.

In my simple HTML5 game, the planet stops moving (and the game ends) when it hits any asteroid or boundaries of the Canvas. I modified it so that the planet explodes when it hits any obstacle. And for this I used Sprites. KineticJS makes animating Sprites very easy. This is how my sprite sheet looks like (sprite sheet is one image that contains small individual sprite images) –

Continue reading “Sprite Animation in HTML5 Canvas with KineticJS”

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Collision Detection in HTML5 2D Games


I wanted to make the Simple HTML5 Game I had created a couple of weeks back a little more interesting. I decided that I would add some obstacles in the way of the moving object. The goal then would be to prevent the moving object from hitting the obstacles and boundaries of the Canvas. This required implementation of collision detection (between moving object and obstacles) logic. If shape of the image is rectangular, then it is easy to detect collision; this is something I had already implemented in the last game, where I checked if the moving object hits any of the four boundaries. But if shape of the image is irregular, then it requires a bit more work to detect collision. But first, try out the modified game below and see how collision detection works –
Continue reading “Collision Detection in HTML5 2D Games”

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JavaScript Graphics Libraries

Last year I was evaluating options for JavaScript graphics libraries for ColdFusion Builder ORM extension. The extension lets you select tables from a datasource and displays it in a browser window. You can them configure relationships, table fields, data types etc and generate CFC code. Here is the screen shot of that extension.

I evaluated SVG and Canvas for graphics/drawing in this extension. However Canvas was not supported in Internet Explorer at that time. SVG was supported on all desktop browsers, but Android browser at that time did support SVG (Android version was 2.2 then) . Since this application was meant to be used on desktop, I decided to go with SVG. Fortunately I came across a very good SVG JavaScript library, RaphaelJS, which made drawing and manipulating shapes in the web page a lot easier. I used JQuery + RaphaelJS together in my application. I used these two libraries for my another extension to monitor CF server memory.
Continue reading “JavaScript Graphics Libraries”

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A Simple HTML5 Game



My son is having summer vacation and he wanted to learn animation and create games. He had learnt Flash and ActionScript a couple of years back. So he started developing a game in Flash. However he ran into few issues and sought my help. Since I don’t know Flash, I could not help him much. But I suggested that if he develops his game in HTML5, I could help him. So while teaching him HTML5 and animation, I ended up creating a very simple game, which I want to share here.
Continue reading “A Simple HTML5 Game”

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Improving Animation Performance in HTML5 Canvas – Part II

In this post I had described how I was able to improve performance of animation in HTML5 Canvas by using a backup Canvas. The trick was to draw static part of the main Canvas on the backup Canvas and whenever any object moves (during animation), draw the content of backup Canvas on to the main Canvas first and then draw moving objects. I had optimised this by copying only a part from the backup Canvas that was exposed by the moving object. This gave me much better animation performance than redrawing scene every time.

Though the animation was better, I was still not happy with the performance. It worked fine on small devices like phones, but animation was still not very smooth on tablets. So I started looking for ways to improve it further.
Continue reading “Improving Animation Performance in HTML5 Canvas – Part II”

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