Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Looking at the History of HTML5 Engines

Although the canvas element has been around in some form since it was introduced by Apple to power OS X Dashboard components in 2004, it has been only in the past few years that people began to take HTML5 seriously as a platform for game development. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but the performance limitations of JavaScript and the lack of high-performance rendering kept JavaScript from being considered for serious game development by most sane individuals.

That began to change in 2008. In response to the processing requirements of the increasingly massive amounts of JavaScript that were beginning to appear in Ajax-heavy applications, such as Google’s GMail JavaScript, performance began to be taken seriously by browser makers.

To help speed up its own applications, Google released the Chrome browser powered by the V8 JavaScript engine, and Safari and Firefox both launched new JavaScript engines that boosted performance immensely. The JavaScript arms race was on in full force, and people slowly began to look at JavaScript more and more like a real language that could be used for larger-scale application development.

Developers have an uncontrollable impulse to program games in whatever medium they work in, and JavaScript was no different. Simple games in JavaScript have been around since its inception, but in 2008 things began to change as some brave souls, such as the developers behind GameQuery (http://gamequeryjs.com/) began ...