Crossforum theatre of democracy - development challenges

[Michael Allan]

I pretty much settled on a runtime platform.  I think it's best to
stick with the Web standards (JavaScript, HTML, SVG).  That way we
cover all the mobile devices that have decent browsers.  No other
platform has that kind of coverage (not even Flash).  It's also
relatively future proof.

A drawback is the 2D graphics support.  There's nothing like the
design/development toolkits that come with Flash, Silverlight or Java.
But I learned you can do a lot with SVG.  I like this balloon:
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/balloon.svg

It looks better if your browser window is 2X wider than tall.  Check
out the code (view source).  6.6 KB!  (No wonder it loads so fast.)
You can also play chess against your browser in SVG:
http://www.vectomatic.org/gwt/lib-gwt-svg-chess/lib-gwt-svg-chess.html

Both of those should work on Blackberry and iPhone/iPad.  SVG is
currently disabled in the Android, but Google plans to enable it in a
future release: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1376

Performance of SVG animation is currently poor.  (The slow swaying of
that balloon nearly brings my desktop to its knees.)  But I think the
browsers are all getting hardware acceleration soon, and it should
cover the vector graphics.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/