The mobile web: novelty and familiarity in good measure

All right, so this time I decided to venture into uncharted territory: mobile development (and I'm no ace at JavaScript, either). Nevertheless I chose to attended Nicolai Onken's "Creating cross-platform mobile applications with the Dojo Toolkit". I had a feeling that mobile development is both different and familiar (the mobile platform is a new kid on the block - but hasn't JavaScript been around since1995?)

Many interesting insights were gleaned from this presentation. Firstly, it turns out that mobile and web development really aren't that different. (Yes, there are differences in screen sizes and hardware capacity). And secondly: much of what applies to good practices in web development transfers to mobile development (I consider this another case for the web as platform, described earlier in this blog). Judge for yourself:

Are you using the Web Standards trio (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) to create prototypes for web applications? Well, you can create a perfect mobile app using the very same methodology, as exemplified by EventNinja.

Are you following Steve Souder's advice and minify JavaScript to improve performance? This is something you will be doing (religiously) when developing mobile apps.

(You might, however, find that writing inline CSS improves performance. This flies in the face of good web practice, but consider that for the mobile platform craves every little performance tweak available. As Nikolai said, "Do what your runtime can do and not more". This means, among other things, no rounded-corner effects using a "div" per shaved-off pixel of a rounded corner ;-).

Have you used JSON in a web app? As Nikolai believes, JSON (!=XML) is the format for mobile development.

In fact, mobile development being the sandbox for cutting-edge tricks now begins to influence web applications and browsers - things are turning around. So much so that geolocation, which has probably been among the top mobile apps, is finding its way into the web browser (Firefox is doing it already).

And, it may surprise many developers that CSS 3 is available on many mobile devices! So, if you have been tinkering with a cutting-edge mobile app utilizing CSS 3 it may be pushing the technology's adoption for web applications, some way down the line in the future.

The mobile web is here, and it's both same and different.