Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology |
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Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile technology. You also can read the blog via Twitter or your phone via wap.abiro.com. See the left menu for more news services. Comments on blog entries are moderated, but I'm rather liberal as long as it's not blatant advertising. For general comments, advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. |
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Monday, October 08, 2007
FAQ on Mobile Ajax
Simply put Mobile Ajax is a version of Ajax that has features for handling the differing and small display sizes and other limitations specific to mobile devices. The FAQ doesn't say anything about access to the camera, Bluetooth etc, so such integration is probably left out. Apart from that, it seems to support the full set of Ajax features: XML/XHTML, DOM editing, CSS, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest. There are still few mobile browsers being deployed that even support JavaScript, so we are not quite there yet.
There's also a relatively objective comparison of Mobile Ajax and the major mobile application platforms Java ME and Flash Lite.
One reason that Mobile Ajax is more compatible across devices than Java ME is that it's much simpler and doesn't access nearly as much phone functionality than Java ME. It's not the only reason though, that I've mentioned a couple of times before, like Java ME being provided by several different suppliers (read: not good for achieving compatibility). A big advantage of Java ME and Flash Lite is that they both work well for off-line applications. Ajax doesn't.
For Ajax based widgets to work really well from an end user perspective the browser should be fully integrated in the phone's UI and even the main (so called "idle") screen, and ideally the whole UI would be browser based, provided it doesn't cripple the user experience.
Mobile AJAX - Frequently Asked Questions
There's also a relatively objective comparison of Mobile Ajax and the major mobile application platforms Java ME and Flash Lite.
One reason that Mobile Ajax is more compatible across devices than Java ME is that it's much simpler and doesn't access nearly as much phone functionality than Java ME. It's not the only reason though, that I've mentioned a couple of times before, like Java ME being provided by several different suppliers (read: not good for achieving compatibility). A big advantage of Java ME and Flash Lite is that they both work well for off-line applications. Ajax doesn't.
For Ajax based widgets to work really well from an end user perspective the browser should be fully integrated in the phone's UI and even the main (so called "idle") screen, and ideally the whole UI would be browser based, provided it doesn't cripple the user experience.
Mobile AJAX - Frequently Asked Questions
