Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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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
