Stimulant’s first HTML5 project launched today at WebVizBench.com. You’ll need the IE9 beta to run it properly, but the video above gives you a good idea of how it works. The full writeup is on the Stimulant blog, and it’s included among the many experiences available on BeautyOfTheWeb.com.

It is essentially a visualization of every song played on KEXP over the span of about seven years, totaling close to 800,000 data points. It also includes a benchmark mode, which stresses a browser’s GPU features in order to show off what a nice video card can do for future browsing experiences.

I was the sole developer on the project, working with all of the other teams at Stimulant. It started out as our first Azure project — I developed an Azure worker role to harvest and reformat data and album art from a not-yet-released KEXP API.

The application you see in the browser is 100% JavaScript, using jQuery and a few jQuery plugins. The grid of album art and the gray grid in the background (click and drag on that for fun) are implemented using the canvas tag. The tooltips are SVG, the background video uses the video tag, and there’s tons of DOM animation between states. Additionally I wrote a small library for making the development of canvas-based applications a little more sane, which we may use in future projects. If you’re interested in seeing the code, the debug version of the app is un-minified.

This is the first time I’ve developed a native browser application in a while, and I can say that browsers and JavaScript libraries have come a long way. However I think they’ve still got a while to go before developing in the browser is as easy and fun as it is in consistent plug-in or native environment.