I recently had the pleasure of working with jQuery’s new mobile framework. It’s not very often that I work with a framework that will so clearly change the playing field for developers.
Prior to this framework, developing an application for the mobile world meant expensive development costs for each platform. On top of that, each device on a platform could potentially throw a wrench in your plans. For instance, Blackberry seems to have a whole variety of its own devices and Android can run on even more! There just wasn’t any hope.
At least Apple only has the iPhone(3,4 and 5), iPad(1 and 2) but then your application has to sit in a queue for months before it will be released. This makes bug fixes and software updates a nightmare.
So what does jQuery do to change everything? Well now mobile apps will run in the browser, the way the Internet is evolving anyway. Clients no longer need to download the app, it runs real time off a more powerful server. All the complicated hardware issues for each device have been solved by the browser’s development team and I just need to deal with good ol’ HTML, CSS and whatever code might go into the backend. To put it mildly, it slashes development time and therefore budget by a huge margin.
So what kinds of apps can we expect to see coming from this new framework? Thanks to Google Maps Mobile, most location based applications will run as you’d like. Even ones that use the client’s location and Google directions. Applications that require you to sign in will work nicely, produce custom content based on user specific settings and store their state for later use. And lastly you have plenty of control over the screen to manage pinch zooming, scrolling, navigation and the url bar.
Stay tuned, this will mean a lot more web based content for mobile devices in the near future!