Building Web Apps? Check out our Field Guide
By Pete LePage, Developer AdvocateYesterday,
the Chrome Developer Relations team launched several new resources, including the
Field Guide to Web Applications.
It’s a new resource that is designed to help web developers create great web apps. We’ve heard
loud and clear from users that they want more and better web apps, and we hope this new field
guide will enable you to create those web apps. Our fictitious author
Bert Appward
guides you through topics like the properties of web applications, design fundamentals, tips
for creating great experiences, and a few case studies that put best practices to use. Whether
you're building your first web app or are just looking for ways to improve your existing apps,
I hope you'll find the field guide useful.
We built the field guide to
embody the principles and best practices that it preaches. We stepped away from the normal
webpage look, and instead designed the experience around a field guide. We used many CSS3
features like box-shadow, opacity, multiple backgrounds and more to provide a
rich,
visual experience. To make sure that it worked
offline,
we used AppCache and other than some URL rewriting techniques, didn't use any server-side
code. We used the HTML5 History API to maintain page state even though everything is served
from a single HTML page. We've started working on a new case study about the field guide, so
check back soon for that!
Pete LePage is a
Developer Advocate on the Google Chrome team and works with developers to create great web
applications for the Chrome Web Store. He recently helped launch the +Chrome Developers
page on Google+.Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor