Question

I am trying to find a tutorial or websites that describes how tools like deck.js or html5rocks work. What I want to learn is to make app-like webpages with the ability to switch to a new page without reloading and with some nice animations.

I’m really sorry to bother you with this, but all my searches lead to manuals for creating presentations with that frameworks.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is information on Single-Page Applications, or SPA for those in the know. I have not had much experience with Deck.js, but from what I just saw it looks pretty impressive. In my opinion, the foundation for a great SPA app is Knockout.js and jQuery. It doesn’t appear that Deck deals with any model binding, change tracking, etc, so you should be fine to mix that in with a SPA app pretty easily. There are a lot of really great tutorials out there, John Papa just posted an excellent presentation on PluralSight.com about SPA development and architecture.

After spending close to a year working with various forms of SPAs, I can tell you that an application that never “reloads” can run into some pretty wild issues; memory management being the big one. I have opted towards sectional reloads, as in each site “section” will be single-page, but you load each section with a postback. This allows you to clear out any memory issues, bindings, etc, and will make the application run much smoother in the long run. That is, until all the issues with memory are a thing of the past…

Hope all this helped, best of luck!