Twelve months ago Enyo made its first appearance on the conference circuit at O’Reilly’s 2012 Fluent conference. Last week the Enyo team returned to the event to highlight the progress and advancements the framework has made over the last year.
Over 1200 folks attended the three-day conference, with a large number stopping by our booth to speak with us about Enyo. Since the last Fluent event we have seen the Enyo community grow steadily and were delighted with the general awareness of Enyo. As always, those new to Enyo were pleasantly surprised to find out about a free, open source, cross-platform framework that does what it aims to do — make life easier when building applications that can run across all of the major platforms and even some smaller and newer ones.
Late Wednesday morning, Roy Sutton, a member of our Developer Relations team and author of the O’Reilly book, Enyo: Up and Running, stopped by to sign copies of the book for adoring fans at the O’Reilly booth.
Then on Thursday, Enyo team member Peter Helm was interviewed by the O’Reilly Fluent organizers and spoke a little about Enyo and why you should use it. Check out the video below.
Overall, we had a great time at the event and we look forward to seeing you all at our next event! Until then, feel free to keep showing us all of the amazing projects you are working on with Enyo — we love to hear about them.
Last week, the Enyo team joined other major exhibitors at the 2nd annual Tizen Developer Conference. As the only exhibitor with a cross-platform HTML5 framework, we showed Enyo-based apps running “natively” on the new Tizen OS (where — like on webOS, Firefox OS and Chrome OS — web apps are native apps). Developers were keen to see Enyo in action on the latest Tizen prototype devices and compare the performance to some of the other platforms supported by Enyo.
Our team spent three days with hundreds of HTML5 app developers, educating them both on the simplicity of developing with Enyo for Tizen as well as deploying Enyo apps on multiple platforms. We were able to show many new fans how they can use the power of cross-platform development to bring their projects to virtually every available operating system — including Tizen, which is fully supported, despite its official launch still being some time away.
In addition to being an exhibitor and sponsor, our own Art Dahm gave a great talk on Friday about developing an Enyo app from the ground up. The conference was a success for everyone involved, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with our new Tizen developer friends on the Enyo forums!
Just in time for Tizen Developer Conference, we are excited to announce that Tizen has been added to Enyo’s ever-growing list of supported platforms.
With the release of Tizen 2.1, we’ve verified that the HTML5-based open source operating system is Enyo-compatible. Showcasing the strengths of Enyo and validating its cross-platform nature, no framework changes were required to support Tizen. Developers with existing Enyo 2 apps are expected to find that they run beautifully on Tizen.
“We are delighted to have Enyo include Tizen support in its framework,” says Christopher Croteau, Tizen Association Board member and Managing Director of Intel’s System Software Division. “This outstanding testimonial shows that HTML5 really is a cross-platform technology.”
Join us at the conference on Friday at 1.30 where we will be speaking on how to create a simple cross-platform Enyo app and deploy it to a Tizen device. Also stop by the Enyo booth to learn more about Enyo and talk to our engineers about why Enyo is the right solution for you.
The Enyo team will be once more on the road, showing off the power of Enyo. The road in question is the 101 in California, which will lead us to San Francisco.
First up is the Tizen Developer Conference, May 22nd to 24th. Enyo is a Silver sponsor and Art Dahm will be speaking on Friday May 24th at 1:30PM. Art will discuss native quality cross-platform app development with Enyo. If you happen to miss the talk, we’ll also have a booth where you can see live demos of Enyo every day of the conference.
Next up, Enyo is once again sponsoring O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference, May 28th through 30th. The team will be on-hand to demonstrate the benefits and ease of Enyo. Those who saw us last year at Fluent can stop by our booth to see how much Enyo has evolved. Those who missed us last year shouldn’t make that mistake again! Roy Sutton will be signing his book Enyo: Up and Running on Wednesday at 10:30 AM at the O’Reilly booth.
Both events will be held at the Hilton Union Square. For those of you unable to attend the conferences, we encourage you to follow us on Twitter so you can be the first to know when we come to your town.
Did you know that typing $0 into the JavaScript console gives you a reference to the currently selected element in the Elements tab in the developer tools on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera? It’s a pretty cool little known fact. But okay, maybe you already knew that.
But did you know Enyo also maintains a hash of all active enyo.Control’s in enyo.$, with the associated DOM id for a control as its key? Ah-hah! Gotcha.
So, smarty-pants, what would enyo.$[$0.id] give you? None other than a reference to the Enyo control associated with the last piece of DOM you selected in the Elements tab. Pretty cool, eh? Next time you want to interact with a control in your app on the console, give it a try! Happy Thursday, developers!
Enyo developer Cecil Jolley has reached out to the Enyo team to report tremendous success in using the Enyo framework to build a new electronic medical records (EMR) system for Parkview Medical Center, in Pueblo, CO. The new system makes charting and data retrieval safer and more secure for their employees. In fact, the EMR application has been such a success that he is hard at work on two more applications for the system.
Because Enyo provides a way to focus on the business problem instead of having to focus on the issues surrounding cross-platform performance and multiple form factors, Jolley was able to quickly implement a solution:
“With our new EMR system, one big item that has been made available to us is a new DR (Data Repository) system. Essentially, if our entire EMR system was to go down, theoretically we could still access the data needed through the DR which is really just a SQL repository,” said Jolley. “Downtime is obviously a huge concern in any medical setting, but with a web based app separate from the EMR, we could continue to query and retrieve any data we need from the DR… I would never have thought of using Enyo for a data reporting framework but it absolutely works beautifully.”
Additionally, Jolley has used Enyo to create an app that manages printing bar-coded patient bracelets, which are integral in tracking diagnoses and avoiding drug interactions. In true Enyo cross-platform form, Jolley writes: “We can now manage all of our print servers from any desktop, or any mobile device connected to our internal network!”
Finally, in an industry where reliability is an imperative, “In the worst case if our EMR went down… I’ve built another website which simply presents the user with a form to fill out and then using Enyo/Ajax/PHP, generates the barcodes and labels needed.”
We were thrilled to hear about Cecil’s Enyo success story — thanks, Cecil! Have a story of your own? Let us know! We always love to hear about Enyo developers applying the framework in new and exciting ways.
Last week at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, Enyo sponsored its second HTML5 Developer Conference in a row. With over 2000 attendees this was an ideal setting to show case Enyo’s cross platform allure. We had the opportunity to talk with developers from a variety of industries about Enyo’s new MVC capabilities and were delighted to hear the growth awareness of Enyo since the last event.
In addition to the booth, three of our team members gave talks about the virtues of using Enyo for cross-platform app development. Dave Freeman gave a “Birds of the Feather” class for developers already familiar with Enyo on April 1st. On the 2nd, we had two talks addressing the virtues of developing with using Enyo’s component model: one by Roy Sutton, author of our O’Reilly book Enyo: Up and Running, and another more general introduction to components by Enyo Engineering Director Gray Norton which was attended by over 60 people.
It was a great conference for all, and we look forward to seeing you all at our next event!
After a lot of work over the last few months, we’re pleased to announce the release of Enyo 2.2! This time around, we’ve been focusing on two major areas.
Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10
First up is new platform support — as of Enyo 2.2, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 have all been added to our Tier 1 Platform list.
We’ve supported IE 10 on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 for a while now, but beginning with 2.2 you can also package your Enyo apps as Windows Store apps for distribution and installation on those platforms.
In the case of Windows 8, you can use Visual Studio (with or without Cordova) to package your Windows Store apps. We have documentation on this at Enyo Apps on Windows 8.
Packaging Enyo apps for Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 is like packaging for other mobile platforms — you’ll need a native app container to run in, and we recommend that you use Cordova. Some specific notes on deploying your apps to Windows Phone 8 have been added to our Platform-Specific Deployment docs.
Lists That Go This Way and That
The second headline for Enyo 2.2 is a big revamp of our infinite-scrolling list widget. enyo.List now supports drag-and-drop reordering, as well as “swipeable items”.
With reordering enabled, users can “grab” any list item with a long touch (or long click) and then simply drag it to a new position. We also now support swiping left or right on a list element. Depending on your needs, you might use a swipe to trigger item deletion or to put an item in a mode where additional actions can be performed.
Both reordering and swiping are highly customizable — for details, see the updated API docs for enyo.List.
To see the new list features in action, check out this sample.
And More…
Like previous releases, Enyo 2.2 also includes a host of smaller enhancements and fixes. A few examples:
ContextualPopup widget that’s bound to the location of another control, with some smart positioning logic to make the most of the available space. You can try it out here.XmlHttpRequest code has been updated to address some issues and enable a broader set of use cases in IE.enyo.TransitionScrollStrategy works much like enyo.TouchScrollStrategy but uses CSS animation rather than JavaScript to update the properties of the scrolled region. It looks like this new strategy will yield faster scrolling on many platforms, but there are still some kinks to work out. We’re not yet using TransitionScrollStrategy in any of our widgets or samples and don’t recommend that you use it for production work, but feel free to give it a try if you’re feeling adventurous.For a full set of changes, see our Enyo 2.2 Release Notes.
What’s Next
As you may know, we’ve been hard at work on a data-binding and MV* solution that works with the Enyo component model but also allows interoperability with other libraries like Backbone.js. That work is currently on separate branches, but will be merged into our master branch very soon.
Last week the Enyo team sponsored Apps World North America, which was held in San Fransico. Apps World is, appropriately, a conference that focuses on app development — an area where Enyo really shines. As a cross-platform framework focused entirely on apps we had a message that played well for the thousands of attendees.
At the conference we presented two talks. Kevin Schaaf did a redux of his “Why Components Matter” talk first presented at dotJS EU. Enda McGrath did a presentation titled “Seeing is believing: Cross-platform apps with HTML5.” Both talks were well received and increased traffic at the booth. We were also tapped to participate in two panel discussions. Kevin was a panelist on the topic “Creating compelling HTML5 apps – How to get the look and feel right of HTML5 based apps” and Roy Sutton weighed in on “Exploring cross platform development tools.”
Over the course of the show we held talks in the booth on various aspects of Enyo. In total, we presented sixteen sessions. Pictured below is Peter Helm talking about Enyo’s cross-platform approach:
At the conference we gave away an iPad Mini and a Samsung Galaxy Note II. Pictured below are our two winners: Simon Kong and Jon Brasted.
Additionally, Roy did a book signing at the O’Reilly booth. Attendees were given free copies of Enyo: Up and Running and were able to ask questions and get their copies signed.
These events are important for the Enyo team. Not only do we get a chance to go out and tell people how great we think Enyo is but we also get a chance to hear the day-to-day problems developers are trying to solve. Being able to interact with developers helps us hone our message and improve our framework. If you missed us at Apps World, don’t fret. You can always reach out to us on our forums and catch us at our next conference, HTML5 Developer Conference.
There has been a lot of hype about cross-platform app development with HTML and JavaScript, but it’s tough to build the native-quality apps that users crave using plain-vanilla web technologies. UI plugins and HTML templates can help, but are they enough? In this video, recorded live at dotJS in Paris, our own Kevin Schaaf argues they’re not. Web technologies provide the foundation for a true universal platform, but building native-quality apps on the web stack requires a different approach — one informed by native app development practices.
Using straightforward examples, Kevin shows how tasks that would be difficult to accomplish using traditional tools are easy achieved using Enyo components. Components free developers from having to work at the ‘low level’ of the HTML source and allow them to focus on solving real world problems. Enyo solves the difficult problems of cross-platform support and native-quality performance while increasing maintainability and code reuse.
Watch the video and see that Web technologies are not just buzz, but are able to transform the way apps are made.