Category: Web Development

Discussing Server-side and Other Essential Components for Your Playground

The aim of this entire series was to teach you how easy it is to create a playground like CSSDeck, in reality. We covered everything from building the environment to making it secured. Then we integrated an amazing piece of code editor and finally discussed how to build a nice, performant and secured gallery to show the “real” interactive but scaled down previews of your creations. Although, you might need some extra bells and whistles.

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Cancel CSS3 and JS Animations to Prevent High Memory and CPU Consumption

So you got your creations gallery up on your site and shared the link on some social networks like twitter and facebook. Your loyal fans clicked your link and ended up crashing their browser. OMG! What happened ? Did you have any experiment with lots of amazing CSS3 and JS animations ? Most probably, that’s what happened then. Your experiments were awesome enough to eat up all the RAM and CPU and what not of your fan’s computer and crash it eventually.
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Showcase Your Creations in a Gallery


So you have created your own CSSDeck platform and made loads of creations. But you need a way to show them somewhere on your website or web app. Like a gallery with small previews of the items that other people can browse through and click to view a specific creation. So how to do this ?

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Integrating an In-browser Code Editor to Your Playground


We have already created our environment to write and render html, css, js code and also made it secured. Now we’ll add an in-browser code editing tool that supports syntax highlighting, indentation, themes, zen coding and tons of more cool features to help us code even better.

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Using HTML5 postMessage For a Secured Cross Domain Communication and Rendering

In the previous post, we covered how easy it is to build an environment where anyone can write in HTML, CSS, JS code that gets rendered and displayed in a sandbox (iframe) in realtime. It’s all good as long as the platform is restricted to yourself, but when it becomes open, i.e., when others can create testcases or use it for some other purpose as on CSSDeck, you need to start thinking about security.

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Creating the Environment To Write Code and Render in Realtime

After the Introduction, its time to build things! We will basically lay out a basic UI for the playground and learn how to render our code in the sandbox.

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Building Your Own HTML, CSS, JS Realtime Playground

Many months ago I built this site called CSSDeck. Its an interesting app where you can write your HTML, CSS, JS code inside few code editors that gets rendered and displayed in realtime in an output area (sandbox). Similar to JSFiddle, yeh! But the intent was a bit different. Instead of aiming for a playground where people could just create testcases, I wanted to build a community of people who would create some cool creations with their CSS3 and Javascript skills and all I would do is feature them on the Home Page of the site. Whatever people submit shows up in their profile page which means they can share their profile link with anyone and show off how awesome they are.

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