Is it possible to develop Live Tiles in HTML5 Windows 8 Metro apps?

Question

Is it possible to develop Live Tiles in HTML5 Windows 8 Metro apps or do we need to develop in C# and XAML for that ?

Answer 1

An app written in any language manages tile updates using WinRT APIs, so there is no difference in capabilities from that perspective. A tile update that creates a live tile is simple a piece of XML that you send to the TileUpdater.Update method, and samples like the App tiles and badges sample, the Secondary tiles sample, and the Push and Periodic Notifications sample all show you variations on the theme.

On the server side--to create a periodic notification service or one that can issue push notifications--you can pretty much use any server-side language you want like PHP, ASP.NET, etc., because it's just a matter of generating the XML payload for the tiles.

Chapter 13 of my newly-released ebook, Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The ebook is free, so there's no excuse to not download it :)

.Kraig