After day one of Devoxx, the talk that I found most engaging was Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith’s State of the Web. They argued that Apple’s AppStore (and to a lesser extend Google’s App Marketplace) has created a gigantic marketplace of people willing to download and pay for applications. Previously this market was unserved, because the web does not have place to browse, it’s all about searching.
Dion and Ben would like to see a “WebStore” for websites. Basically what Yahoo! once was, a curated list of only the best websites. They think this is possible because with the advent of HTML5 and all of its related technologies, there really is no reason why a website should be any less interactive or any less refined than a native app.
They might have a point. Creating a HTML5 web application has the added advantage that, if done right, it’s also cross platform. If you don’t use proprietary extensions, the same web app will work on iPhone, Android and other smartphones. It’ll even work on a normal browser. Although I suppose the difference in screen resolution will be a little too huge to get a nice looking site on both extremes.
I did a little research to see what’s out there for mobile web app development. I have a few ideas to make something myself, so who knows, my first iPhone app might be coming soon. Until then, here are some good resources to get started :
- jQTouch is a jQuery plugin for mobile development. On my iPod Touch, the demo site was very enjoyable to navigate. I’m going to have to load it in the Android emulator soon to see how it looks there.
- Just like jQTouch, the Appcelerator Titanium platform was suggested by Dion and Ben. From the little I’ve read, I’ve gathered that the platform offers a cross-compiler that can compile one web application to many different platforms. It looks very professional and is open source so this might be the first platform I’m going to try myself.
- iWebKit is focused on the iPhone platform. The advantage is that it looks better than jQTouch, the disadvantage is that it probably won’t look as nice on Android phones. GigaOm has a nice tutorial.
If you know any more frameworks/libraries/platforms, feel free to share them in the comments. There’s always room for some more choices.