In the 21st century, businesses must embrace the new digital age. The gambling industry capitalised on this greatly, to become a multi-billion-dollar industry internationally and continues to grow. They made the act of gambling as easy as downloading apps or visiting gambling websites without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home – the beauty lies in its convenience.
No longer do people have to enter casinos to gamble away their money, it is as easy as opening your phone and loading a page. But the process of getting to this point wasn’t as easy as you may think.
Over the last 30 years, programming languages and software have become very sophisticated in such a short amount of time and only through trial and error were they able to make this work. So, let’s look at the history of this industry and insights into what made on-the-go gambling what it is today.
Let’s start at the beginning. Remember back in the day when downloading games required you to travel to your local game store, look for the game, buy the game, walk home, download the game, etc. It was a very long process and a lot of the time the issues didn’t stop there. There were slow connections, memory issues and so on.
Or, if you were unlucky, you would download the game from a questionable website leaving viruses on your computer. It was a rough start. But eventually, developers started using JavaScript to develop their websites which was the first technological breakthrough they had. Not only did JavaScript allow for the number of different gambling games to be more varied, but it also meant faster loading speeds and no more downloading viruses onto your computer such as on luckycat777.
Gambling websites that ran on JavaScript improved the convenience of the process allowing for a safer, faster experience. It was the norm for developers for a very long time to develop with JavaScript and is even being utilised in the current programming language of choice HTML5 today, in conjunction with HTML and CSS. But, as mobile casinos became a trend and mobile phones became more advanced, the flaws and issues with JavaScript become more and more apparent despite their best efforts to implement it into mobile gaming.
In the early stages of mobile gaming development, the obvious choice was WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Looking back there were a lot of issues with this.
First of all, due to being in the early stages, WAP was very slow and not as sophisticated as most development software we have access to today. Using it also meant that the “High Stakes” aspect of gambling was taken away from gambling veterans, as real money gambling wasn’t possible which made the experience more casual rather than meaningful.
This was quickly replaced by Java ME, which solved all the issues that WAP had. It was faster, allowed real money to be played with, it was safer and provided the convenience that was expected of mobile gaming.
All good things eventually come to an end as did Java ME. With the digital age evolving rapidly, there were new operating systems and a wide variety of different phones due to the phone industry competing for the highest market share.
Inconsistency in the version of JavaScript meant that app developers had to cater to this by producing multiple versions of the same game, just to allow for the game to be played on multiple platforms. In the long term, this wasn’t very sustainable and a new technological solution was needed to grow the industry.
Now, we skip to the present, where we now have a strong understanding of Computer Science and app development. The result of years and years of trial and error lead to the holy grail of this field, HTML5. HTML5 is better than JavaScript, WAP and Java ME in every single way you could think of. Safety? Check. Compatibility? Check. Higher Security?
Check. We are currently at our peak for app development and technology can only get better and better. It also added some more quality of life changes, such as being able to play these casino games on web browsers such as Safari and Google Chrome, so you wouldn’t have to download the app on your phone to play.
The reason the Casino industry has grown as much as it has over the last couple of decades is that it decided to adapt and evolve in this rapidly changing environment, it didn’t happen without a lot of testing and a lot of mistakes. But it has come a long way since the ages of slow dial-up connections and inefficient programming languages.
