Book Review: Programming Html5 Applications

[Saint_Michael 3]

With HTML5 well into power, its biggest competitor, though gaining a lot of ground to it, is still Flash, HTMl5 applications are slowly becoming the norm in the online and mobile worlds.. At a measly 121 pages, Programming HTML5 Applications gives you a beginning to were you should concentrate your programming skills in order to build both Desktop and mobile apps. This book is heavy in JavaScript coding and that is understandable as you will need a powerful language like JavaScript in order to produce many of the functions in your applications and so the question is this, what does the book cover.

Interestingly enough, we already know much of what is covered through various websites and books. Such as file uploading, drag and drop, offline storage, creating databases, web sockets and more. However, the one thing that intrigues me the most that you can create a simple but stable database with HTML5 and JavaScript and so that is the chapter I will talk about in this review.

Called IndexedDB, it is a non-SQL based database platform. Microsoft IE, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome support this database. One feature that seems to stand out for me is that it has its own built-in security measure in which no other pages or web hosts can access that database unless they are actually on that page to which the database is connected too. Another nifty security measure is the fact that IndexedDB cannot be attacked with SQL injections and thus provides a way to hack into the database and destroy or steal data. Of course, the bad part is that it is still susceptible to XSS attacks which use JavaScript as a form of that attack. The other part that I like about this, and I am only assuming based on the example giving in the book, but if you been coding in JSON the structure in the below example almost looks the same

IndexedDB Example

{		    "title":"Real World Haskell",		    "price": 49.95,		    "price_can":49.95,		    "authors" [					    "Bryan O'Sullivan",					    "John Goerzen",					    "Don Stewart"		    ],		    "cover_animal": "Rhinocerus Beetle",		    "cover_url": "http://...",		    "topics": ["Haskell"]}

JSON Example

{    "Book": [	    {"title": "Real World Haskell"},	    {"price": "49.95"},	    {"price_can": "49.95"},	    {"authors": "Bryan O'Sullivan"},	    {"authors": "John Goerzen"},	    {"authors": "Don Stewart"},	    {"cover_animal": "Rhinocerus Beetle"},	    {"cover_url": "http://..."},	    {"topics": "Haskell"}    ]}

I will point out, that the JSON example could be more optimized, but you will notice that both use a lot of the same structure and so if you got JSON licked, then you will have no problems working in IndexedDB. However, creating the database in the first part and for the next few pages the author goes through the process of connecting, creating, adding, updating, recieving and of course deleting the data. Which comes to my next point in which if you got strong database skills, all you have to do is learn the languages specific to IndexedDB and you will be good to go on creating sophisticated databases that you can use for your HTML5 based application.

Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of the information is old and or updating to something current, but I regress that if you’re starting out in HTML5 and want to get into the advance side of things. Then this book will be a nice little starter to get you going.