2011: Ten^H^H^Ha bunch of Amazing JavaScript demos
2011: Ten^H^H^Ha bunch of Amazing JavaScript / HTML5 demos
These demos then are the eye candy that sucked me in to look seriously at this stuff. Besides extracting massive performance gains from current hardware the programming model is such that it scales transparently across multiple machines. But these are just pretty, and the complexity of what they do belies that first examination of the language and assessment as a toy. Mea maxima culpa. So, here are the 10 demos that blew my mind, and I'll be keeping track of these through the years so we can see how much progress we've made, say, in a decade.
Many of these work in all browsers, the linux emulator (!) only runs in Chrome. The V8 engine in there is SO fast it's like opening a new door from a programming perspective.
Charts and graphs have been around on the web as far back as when Tom Bouttel had hair. But now they're in 3D and can be moved in real time while being animated.
Japanese demo of a phone, with an adjustable point of view. Blazingly fast in Chrome, but works in other browsers, just really slowly. In my opinion this demo is equivalent in computational complexity to a very large Facebook "page" that has scrolled all day.
A javascript video player. That's not new, but this one is a little different. It uses individual frames and sequences them to the screen frame by frame, giving you single frame precision, something you can't do with flash.
Postscript 2014: exploiting HTML5's video tag, it's now morphed into VideoJS
While javascript might be handy for making buttons change color on a web form, that's all well and good, but what happens if you write, say, the Windows desktop in JavaScript? Here are several examples of just that.
Arguably the mother of all JavaScript demos. Buddy writes emulators, discovers JavaScript and writes an x86 emulator for it. He can now run one x86 program. so what does he run? Linux. Oh hahaha, funny, it'll be slow but I guess in theory it'd work. Maybe. It works. And it's not slow. You can compile and run a program and it's not much slower than doing on, say, a large Sun with an average load. This woke me up.