In this presentation from Strange Loop 2010, Michael Galpin discusses developing mobile web applications, HTML 5, WebKit, ACID 3, PhoneGap and Appcelerator, Viewports, geolocation, DOM storage, Web Workers, Web Sockets and server-side data pushing, Canvas, CSS 3.0, application cache, the Device API, touch events, video/audio, meta tags, and support for each of these on assorted mobile platforms.
Steve Levin, VP at scanR, shares his experience and insight on the challenges developing an application for multiple mobile devices and platforms. He mentions the hardware difficulties encountered, the common software incompatibilities they had to surmount, and some details on what it takes to sell an application through online application stores.
Nokia has re-licensed its Mobile Runtime for Java Applications (JRT) under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Symbian Platform, still by far the largest smartphone OS, was itself released under EPL in February.
Vision Mobile has published the Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond report, containing the results of a survey across +400 developers working on the most important eight mobile platforms. The survey shows what platform the developers prefer, what is the installed base and number of apps per platform, time needed to learn and debug on a platform, and others.
Mobile Ruby developers get a new version of Rhodes: the 2.0 release brings many new features, and also puts the framework under the MIT license. іPhone developers will be glad to hear Rhodes apps are being accepted into the AppStore. Also: Android developers and users can use JRuby with Ruboto and Ruboto-IRB.
Microsoft seems to be pushing Silverlight into a cross-platform web application framework for mobile devices. Silverlight is already available for Windows Phone 7 and Symbian^1, and it seems it is being also ported to Android and iPhone.
Rhomobile has released Rhodes 1.5, the Ruby based, cross-platform, smartphone app-framework Rhodes. InfoQ asked Rhomobile CEO Adam Blum whether we still need native apps when we have HTML 5?
PhoneGap allows to build cross platform mobile apps with HTML5 and Javascript; it has APIs for accessing camera, accelerometer, GPS, etc. The code is packaged into native apps which can be deployed via app stores. PhoneGap support includes iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm. InfoQ talked to one of the creators of PhoneGap, Brian LeRoux of Nitobi, about the current state of PhoneGap.
The Symbian Foundation announced their intention to open source the Symbian platform almost 20 months ago. While some consider this as an important move for the most deployed platform in mobile devices, others think that it is too late.
