Thursday, August 28, 2008

Building Mobile Web applications

As mentioned in a previous blog of mine building a web application for a mobile phone is not the same as building one for a computer browser. My suggestions when expanding your application onto the Mobile Web is to 'forget' what you know about web development. The Mobile Web is different. There are three major differences namely bandwidth, the user interface and the limited functionality of the browser.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth although becoming much faster and cheaper still makes it difficult to develop a mobile web application that is extremely dynamic. You will also need to think carefully about the content you want to make available on your mobile web application. Not all of it is normally required when on the move. You need to think of your mobile web application as an extension of your full blown web application and not a replacement.

User Interface

Remember that a mobile web application will run on a small screen and the user will need to navigate typically with the phone's limited buttons or on higher range phones with a stylus. As a result navigation must be simple. In my mind it is best to build the screen vertically i.e. with a vertical scrollbar, but no horizontal one.

Limited Browser Capability

Unless you know that your application will only run on high end phones it is best to keep the screen simple. The majority of mobile phone browsers are very limited in functionality. Theprocessing power of the phone is also orders of magnitude slower than your PC so do not try to be too clever even if the browser supports functionaity like dynamic HTML. There are a lot of nuances that you will need to know about phone browser's such more phones support css built inline in the pages as opposed to residing in a separaste stylesheet, but I will not go into all these details. The dev.mobi website is a very good site to use as a reference particulary look at the online books.

I hope this information helps to get you started and I look forward to hearing about your success stories.

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