PavingWays

We’ve been monitoring the mobile browser market pretty closely during the last couple of years, especially in regard to Mobile Ajax and how it could help to create new and powerful web applications for mobile phones.

Mobile Ajax is a lot of things and it always depends on the individual’s definition what is really meant, but one thing that is a pretty common aspect of Mobile Ajax is the ability that it might at some point be used as a gateway or API to connect the web browser on the phone with the device hardware, such as the GPS system thereby giving access to the device’s position within a mobile web application.

These things are in development at every mobile browser vendor today, that much is for sure, but what’s more interesting, because it’s hardly known, is that this functionality already exists on some BlackBerry Devices, namely those of the 8800 series! Now maybe we’ve been too busy developing our stuff lately to notice, maybe this time nobody really made a big buzz out of this, but personally I feel bad that I missed this until now, because I feel this might have a tremendous impact on mobile web application development:

As TonyB writes in an article called “Blackberry Browser & GPS” on his blog, certain BlackBerries provide a JavaScript object within the web browser that allows the web application to access latitude and longitude from the GPS module on the phone. Security is taken care of by asking the user to allow (or not) the application access to the physical location of the device in a Yes/No alert() window. Simple and, if it works, tremendously powerful!

Too bad BlackBerry devices are known for not having the world’s best web browser on them (to put it politely) - developer documentation seems not to be of much help either. But as results from our ever-running Frost library test show, there might be a BlackBerry device, the BlackBerry 8200 Cingular US (VendorID = 102), that already features support for Ajax. This could be a faked user agent string though, so if you have a 8820 and want to test it, just go to http://pwmwa.com/frost - or we can test it ourselves as soon as you send us over a BlackBerry 8200 ;) As we develop Groupile, we will make sure to include this as soon as possible too.

Please read all details and the code listing in TonyB’s article - thanks for blogging about this!

I recently wrote an article for dev.opera.com about Mobile Ajax and how the Frost Library can deal with that. There is a lot of introductory stuff in there and it might will be the longest and most comprehensive article I have been writing on the topic, there’s even code snippets in there. So it might be a good read for anybody interested in the topic of Mobile Ajax.Thanks to David and Chris from Opera for making that happen and giving me the opportunity.You can read the article at dev.opera.com.

I was attending the Mobile Ajax Workshop at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. The whole workshop was very interesting and I met many interesting people from Japan, Korea, USA, UK, India and companies such as NTT DoCoMo, NHN, Vodfone, Aplix, Motorola, SitePen, NEC and many more.

The event, being a workshop not a conference, was structured a bit different from what I experienced until now. There were different moderated discussions around topics related to Mobile Ajax.  These discussions were conducted in the form of panel discussions, where up to 4 panelists came up on “stage” and held a 5-minute introduction about their position papers that were handed in before the event. I was up in a panel about “one web” with Alan from AOL, Dave from Google and Goro from DoCoMo. Honestly, it  felt a bit strange being in a panel with people from these major players, but it was cool and my presentation went ok too.

Some lessons learnt:

• AOL is using Mobile Ajax in their mobile search (works in IE) on http://wap.aol.com/search
• Aplix is working on a Java based tool that can provide access to device hard- and software to web aplications in the browser through a browser plugin, e.g. web app<->browser<->plugin<->Java<->GPS on phone
• Japan is cHTML (iMode) all the way, but there are full web browsers too, many phones with 2 browsers
• in Korea it’s all XHTML (WAP2.0), many carriers develop their own Flash-like VMs to make content developers use their tools
• Motorola will soon have a widget engine and Ajax support in their browser too
• Content adaptors use many different ways to detect the user-agent, also, but not mainly WURFL, more on DDGW
• Solutions for “offline” detection/browsing/management/handling are crucial, needed and Google Gears looks promising

The minutes of the workshop can be found through the W3C website. Here’s the slides on the Frost Ajax Library from my lightning presentation.

All in all it was a great day and I want to thank Microsoft for hosting the event and lunch, the W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance for putting this event together and especially Daniel Appelquist, Michael(tm) Smith and Jon Ferraiolo for their great work moderating and running the event. Looking forward to the next one.

I want to recommend a book by Jeremy Keith, called “Bulletproof Ajax“. I recommend it for several reasons. First of all, the book is an excellent introduction to Ajax programming in general and everybody starting to write JavaScript code to do Ajax should read it before touching any of the libraries out there.
Secondly the book is especially suited to anybody who is interested in writing Ajax powered apps on mobile devices and constrained browsers. After all the book is all about making JavaScript code bulletproof and that’s exactly what you need to do if you are facing browser constraints, flaky implementations of JavaScript engines and a hugely fragment environment overall.

Jeremy’s book is suited for the beginner, but also for the seasoned developer, since it makes it clear what it all comes down to: writing clean code that gracefully degrades (Jeremy calls his method to do this Hijax) if the application runs in a less-than-ideal environment. There are many best practices and useful code snippets contained and topics such as JSON, web services and accessibility.

The book is not entirely new but nevertheless a must-buy, it was published New Riders Press in February 2007 and I urge everybody interested in Ajax to grab a copy, e.g. at Amazon.

I just found an interesting article about Ajax development for Windows Mobile. It looks like the Microsoft crowd is really into Ajax on their mobile platform, which makes sense…after all makeing a platform appealing to developers is a good thing for the platform. The approach is however different from ours - Microsofties (can you call them like this?) tend to rely on their own tools, namely ASP.net, not open source based tools and libraries.

The article mentions a nice hint for debugging directly on the device: turning on the display of script errors in IE mobile. This is achieved by editing a registry entry, which can be done e.g. with the PHM Registry Editor, a freeware tool. The registry key to change should be this:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

There you need to add a DWORD value called ShowScriptErrors and set its value to 1.

The Article also describes how to enable cross-site access for XMLHttpRequest, which might be useful for development purposes, not so much for end-user apps. And there’s also a workaround for a JSON relates quirk in IE mobile, which does not allow cross-site JSON scripts to be executed if the browser is in “One Column” view mode - I decided not to think about the “why ?” in this case, probably it’s a weird bug.

So make sure you check out the article if you’re interested!

After submitting a position paper, today I got my invite to the Mobile Ajax workshop in Mountain View in late September (28th). I am really looking forward to this since it is one of the rare events that focus exclusively on Ajax on mobile devices and many important and interesting people that are involved in this topic are likely to be present. It’s also the first workshop (= not conference) on this topic. So I am very excited and happy to have the chance to attend this event and meet everybody.

My position paper is about the Frost Ajax library. The only other position paper I have come accross is the one from Mark Baker of Coactus Consulting. It’s entitled “The best mobile Ajax application … is the one that’s never written“, so there’s probably gonna be some interesting discussions.

We are constantly monitoring the web for blog posts about Mobile Ajax and I came across an interesting one. I want to use this occasion to reflect on some of the points in Ben’s post on Technology Evangelist in which he discusses Ajax as a future platform for phone applications and in which he brought up 11 random points on the topic and I want to comment on some of them here (don’t want to spam his comments):

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I am speaking at the Mobile Web Americas conference, in October in Orlando, Florida. The Mobile Web Americas conference will take place 2 - 4 October 2007.

I am pretty excited, because this conference is all about the mobile web. My presentation will be about “Pragmatic Mobile Ajax - an Ajax Library for constrained browsers in action”. I am speaking about Mobile Ajax and how it can improve the user experience in mobile web applications. I will introduce the Frost Ajax Library as a tool for Ajax development on constrained browsers, such as those on mobile phones or gaming consoles. The session will show how and why the Frost library came to life and sheds some light on the underlying approach, which is quite different from other Ajax libraries.

If you are attending or speaking at Mobile Web Americas too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

As previously mentioned I wrote an article about Mobile Ajax for UK’s .net magazine earlier this year.

The article got postponed but now finally appeared in the July issue of the magazine. Thanks go out to Oliver Lindberg and the rest of the .net staff.

Make sure you buy a copy of issue 164 and check out pages 106/107.

The Mobile Ajax FAQ is created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger and is maintained at the Horizon Channel. We welcome comments and feedback at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com.This post has been moved to a page on PavingWays - the following questions link directly there.

• What is Mobile Ajax?
• Is there a Mobile Ajax checklist/minimum requirements?
• What does Mobile Ajax look like?
• Why should one do Ajax on mobile phones / what problem does it solve?
• What are the options to Mobile Ajax?
• How do Flash Lite and Java compare with Mobile Ajax?
• What is the difference between Ajax Platforms, Frameworks, Toolkits and Libraries?
• What existing Mobile Ajax frameworks, toolkits and libraries should I use?
• Can I use existing frameworks, libraries and toolkits?
• What is the relationship between Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets?
• Which browsers support Mobile Ajax?
• Which enterprise applications employ Mobile Ajax?
• What is the role of the Apple iPhone with respect to Mobile Ajax?
• How do applications like mojax or bling software fit in?
• How can you develop for and test on all those browsers?
• What are the (current) hurdles in implementing and running Mobile Ajax applications?
• What is AHAH / AJAH?
• Is there any standardization initiative for Ajax?

Finally I get to post something about my visit to Paris and specifically the XTech conference 2007. I went to XTech to speak about “Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous” and of course to attend as many of the other sessions as possible. Here’s some of my observations:

The location (Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel) was ok, I liked the last location in Amsterdam better though, because the different tracks were closer to each other. The organization was excellent as usual, special thanks to IDEAlliance and Edd Dumbill for that. I even did not have a problem accessing the wireless network - contrary to many others.

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On April 16, 2007 Nokia announced their S60 platform would support widgets in subsequent releases. This means, using their WebKit based browser under the hood, newer phones (S60 3rd ed. with Feature Pack 2) will have support for those small applications, mostly serving not more than a single purpose (e.g. show the weather or an RSS feed) that are well known on the desktop since a couple of years now.

In preparation to my talk at this year’s XTech conference I want to point out some important things related to this announcement. I think widgets on (mobile) devices are a major step in the right direction and I feel the mobile web can finally get the boost it so desperately was waiting for since a couple of years now. “The Ubiquitous Web” is this year’s XTech topic - I feel the mobile web will become ubiquitous pretty soon…This article can be seen as a primer to my talk at XTech: Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous.

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I am speaking at this year’s Xtech conference, on the 17th of May in Paris, France.

The Xtech, Europe’s premier web technology conference, will take place 15 - 18 May 2007. The speakers include some famous people and I am looking forward to meeting some people and friends I met during other conferences before, especially Håkon, Mike and Jeremy.

My presentation will be about “AJAX on mobile devices - making mobile web apps ubiquitous“.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

I was asked a couple of times to post the slides from my presentations (1, 2) about Mobile AJAX, so here they are.

Since I think it can be quite difficult to get valuable information out of these slides without further explanation, I want to use this chance to write a little more about the whole topic from my perspective. I see the topic being discussed in the internet everyday - obviously always from a little different angle, I also see that in some cases the term “Mobile AJAX” is used quite inflationary.

So I created a page about Mobile AJAX, on one hand because I feel the topic is too big for one post in the blog, on the other hand because it is “sticky” on the page and I can keep on editing it there.

Here’s my own opinion on the topic and the current status of my insights into Mobile AJAX. Since I am the developer here at PavingWays and since I have a strong web development background, I will accordingly focus more on the technical side than on business-related areas. I also feel that there is way too few information about the technical side of the whole topic around, so maybe my two cents will even help someone understanding what this mysterious “Mobile AJAX” is all about.

Check out the page here.

A week after our visit to Mobile Monday we attended the Webmontag in Munich. Webmontag is a great platform to meet interesting people from the web business. Organized by Martin Szugat and taking place at the amiando office the event was quite the opposite from the Mobile Monday because of its very relaxed atmosphere and start-up minded people attending.

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In my presentation at the XML 2006 conference in Boston I tried to show that AJAX - as a technology in part based on XML - is a useful and promising tool to create web applications on mobile devices.

To emphasize this, I updated our event finder application that we had used on this year’s Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. The application basically is a website for mobile phones that shows the currently running events of a trade show or conference. In the updated version for the XML 2006 conference I added some AJAX stuff to show and test it’s usefulness:

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Additional to co-moderating the Vendor PechaKucha Night at the XML Conference in Boston I also co-presented a talk on Mobile AJAX and the Mobile Web in general at the XML 2006 conference in Boston together with Michael Smith from Opera.

This was my first presentation at a conference except a lightning demo at this year’s XTech conference about CarCulatr (price finder for used cars to demo mobile AJAX using Opera Platform) and I have to say it could not have been worse…

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