Canvass for Better Ajax in Games

Hundreds of developers have gathered in a recently conclude Zendcom 2008, each development group is excited to present their technology which could hopefully gather enough attention and support. Most are really impressive but one has really caught our attention: Canvass.

This was presented Ben Galbraith, a known personality in the Ajax world because of the website Ajaxian.com where he is one of the founders. Being already a well-known person in Ajax, you would expect that something big is about to be announced by Galbraith.  And he did not disappoint.

Canvass is a very simple yet very powerful technology in building online applications that could change the trend in gaming development. Game developers will not only speed up the process in building an application but would also provide better graphic user interface for a better gaming experience.

This technology is aimed in browsers to cater to the increasing number of online games. It uses the power of Ajax to increase the interactivity of games, without giving game developers a hard time building them.

As the name suggests, game developers will be given an option to build games from the scratch by literally allowing them to paint. Without Canvass this could be achieved by loading the image from another source and carefully applying them for better browser reading. With Canvass, game developers could directly render the image in the browser for better experience.

Canvass will be a lightweight tool since it will be implemented as HTML. It would be rendered to go with HTML 5 which ensures interactivity with different browsers. It’s even simpler to most programming techniques because the already given knowledge of HTML could be used with this engine. The WYSIWYG coding technique could even be used to implement canvass.

This programming technique is basically an add-on to JavaScript. It’s a drawing API wherein developers could be easily injected with functions. With the help of JavaScript, developers could trigger different images along with different functions. Canvass could even be used in developing simple Ajax based applications especially with the given functions of Canvass. It’s an HTML with the functionality of an Ajax based application.

Unfortunately, Canvass could only work in Safari, Chrome (Google’s Browser), Mozilla and Opera. If you’re looking for Internet Explorer, browser incompatibilities are still there. But the developers of Canvass have already thought of a solution. Canvass could be implemented IE with the help of bridge developed by Google. Like in regular Ajax based applications, applications could also be ported to IE with the help of Mozilla’s ActiveX. According to Galbraith, there are already small online applications using Canvass with success.

For game developers, it’s all about the user interface. Game developers will be able to build a highly responsive Ajax based applications. You should be able to see the application or games without any problem. The best part of Canvass is that it is lightweight with very easy interface.

Although it will require knowledge with JavaScript, games could be built faster because developers should be able to freely design games from with the help of Canvass.