Our deployment strategies are all about automating processes and saving time. For highly complex apps you’ll probably want to set up your own custom scripts for some of the tasks we can run automatically for you, but in most cases it’s enough to just hit a button once, and from then on never have to worry about that task again.

Today we’ve crossed one more item off our (still rather long) list of planned deployment strategies: automatic integration of a widget that detects users’ browser capabilities and warns them if a required feature isn’t supported, plus tells them which browsers do support that feature.

How does it work?

The basis for the automatic configuration of the widget is our new features settings page, where you can configure Web platform features that are required or optional for using your app. For your convenience we will detect most (or hopefully all) of those and give you a list for easy selection.

After selecting required features, just enable the new deployment strategy and redeploy your app. Now users will see a nice message when something’s not supported by their browser, including links to more modern browsers. For now it is just the standard HTML5 Please widget, although we may offer other options in the future, as well as use your feature settings in other places, like the upcoming app catalog, of course.

Feature detection

In order to detect Web platform features in your app’s source code, we wrote a little Ruby gem called trufflepig, which is using feature data sourced from Alexis Deveria’s excellent caniuse.com – the exact same data that HTML5 Please is based on.

Our gem is published under the MIT license, so feel free to do with it whatever you want, and be sure to send pull requests if you enhance it in a useful way. We also encourage you to check out both caniuse.com and html5please.com, which are great resources for browser compatibility information.

Feedback welcome

Let us know what you think after trying it out for yourself. We’re all ears for your opinion and suggestions via Twitter, the support site, or a plain old email.

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