Ajit Jaokar is the founder of the London based publishing and research company futuretext (
Ajaxworld feedback – Mobile Ajax
I have been meaning to blog this for a while, but obviously I have been delayed with all my travels
I spoke at Ajaxworld in March
When I first started talking about Mobile Ajax, I was a lonely voice. Today, with support from Nokia – following the pioneering efforts of Opera and Soonr, Mobile Ajax has become very much mainstream – especially through Widgets.
Practically every Mobile browser vendor and device manufacturer has some form of Mobile Ajax support now – and those who did not until too late are in trouble (for instance Openwave)
I first started speaking about Mobile Ajax at Ajaxworld and every Ajaxworld I speak at, the audience becomes bigger and bigger.
Here is some feedback from the last Ajaxworld I spoke at (in March in New York)
richard monson-haefel sr. analyst, burton group
says
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Ajit,
It was a pleasure to meeting you at Ajax world. Your insights on Mobile Ajax and Mobile Web 2.0 were very interesting. I agree that Mobile Ajax and Widgets are going to play a major role in the development of the mobile platform and the web in general – I’m less sure about WICD. I also found your insights about the iPhone and its probable use of Ajax at the operating system level very intriguing – it explains why Jobs was bashing Java ME and Adobe Flash.
Also, thank you for the copy of your book “Mobile Web 2.0″. It is an excellent read (I read most of it on the flight home) and I plan to keep up with your blog every day. In short, I hope we can continue to talk about the developing “Mobile Web 2.0″ space and mobile application development in general – your insights are extremely important to my research.
All the best,
Richard(His company blog is HERE
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Richard from mobitree posted the following(and it seems he came to Ajaxworld only to listen to my talk .. I am flattered!)
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What I learned at AJAXWorld
Posted by Rich
Last Monday I ran into Manhattan for a day to attend a little bit ofAJAXWorld. I just bought a day pass so I could go to Ajit Jaokar’s talk, “Deploying Web-Based Applications to Mobile Devices Using AJAX Techniques“, but I also got to run around to some booths.
Things I learned:
• Laszlo is working with Sun to be able to compile Laszlo AJAX apps to run as J2ME.
• Adobe Apollo is going mobile… at some point. When I pressed about how they see Apollo and Flash Lite competing, I couldn’t get a straight answer.
Ajit’s talk was great – a nice primer of why, when and a little bit of how to use mobile AJAX. Of course Soonr was used as the golden child of mobile AJAX, but it just emphasized the big mobile browser fragmentation problem. All the cool AJAXy stuff doesn’t work on my Windows Mobile device, but yet Pocket IE claims to have limited AJAX support.
What it basically comes down to is browsers claiming “AJAX!” when they really just support XMLHttpRequest, but don’t have the depth of Javascript support or DOM manipulation to back it up.
So the big question of “Will the mobile web be a unifying element on phones?” in my opinion is still not answered – even though Ajit thinks that browsers will evolve and standardize to make it so. Right now, to play the mobile AJAX game, you’re limited to Opera (not mini), Nokia’s S60 and up browsers, and… um.. Yeah that’s it.
Then there’s the iPhone. Disruptive? Oh yes, but in what way we don’t know yet. If they really just throw full-blown Safari on a mobile, you are really limited by CPU horsepower and battery drain. Try running GMail and Google Maps on a battery-driven device for a while an all that asynchronous network updating will suck it dry. So there is still a need to create a nice mobile AJAX standard to optimize for these types of devices.
Will WICD’s mobile profile become that standard? It’s still super early, but I’ll let you decide. Check out this primer by Daniel Appelquist. What about AHAH? Sure it limits what you can do on the device, but simplifying asynchronous updates to just blocks of XHTML certainly addresses power consumption. Forget about your cool real-time image zooming in the browser though.
So what would I pick right now if I don’t want to become a porting house? Straight XHTML. If you can figure out a streamlined, simple UI for your service that can get your logic completely serverside – do it.
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