Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Mobile Ajax FAQ goes through what Ajax in a mobile context is all about. Ajax is also compared with Java ME and Flash Lite, and of course Mobile Ajax comes out on top (the FAQ is written by the promoters of Ajax, so ...).

What's not mentioned here is the lack of access to phone features from Ajax. Just handling the UI and local data is in many cases not enough. For many services the complementing phone applications (or service front-ends) need to take photos, record videos, draw advanced interactive graphics at very high speed (read: games), communicate via Bluetooth etc. Still there are a lot of services that are helped by Ajax in providing a better user experience. It only needs to become more widespread.

The reason Ajax can be compatible across phones is its lack of functionality and lack of phone integration (Java ME and e.g. Symbian OS are on the other hand very much integrated with phone functionality). If you want to make something portable, and admittedly also broadly useful, limit it to the functionality all targeted devices support, in this case graphical output, textual input, Internet communication. Ajax still has the problem that adding it to embedded browsers takes years to deploy on the market. Therefor I recommend Opera to make an Ajax-capable Opera Mini. That way Ajax would be deployed much faster (over-night). There have been attempts to make Ajax-like widget engines in Java, but considering the amount of functionality a Javascript-capable web browser has, it's a pretty tough job.

Ajax is not used for anything advanced or performance-critical on PCs, so expect it to mainly enhance form/text/picture-based services also on mobile phones in the near term.

I'm not flaming Ajax, I'm just saying it's not a cure-all for all the things needed from service-complementing mobile applications, and it's definitely not yet in many phones.