Building for Future: Native App vs Web App – jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch libraries will be helpful to Developers

Sometime back I posted a blog ‘HTML5, AJAX, JavaScript, JavaScript Libraries (e.g. jQuery) – Future of Client Programming’ stating my thoughts on what will be future of client application development where developers doesn’t need to bother about multiple platforms.

In that blog I talked about the client libraries like jQuery, YUI etc… however one thing we need to note here is the UI has to be optimized for two types of devices traditional desktop and laptop where users interact with the application using mouse an other type of devices like smart phones (IPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7) and tablets (IPad, HoneyComb etc.)  where users interact with the device using touch interface.

For the smartphones and tablets there are already libraries released which supports these touch based devices.

jQuery Mobile:

http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0b1/

Sencha Touch:

http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/demos/

I would highly recommend going through the demos which provides good ideas on what points should be considered during building for mobile / tablet optimized web applications.

Building Applications compatible across iOS (iPhone, iPad), Android etc… & HTML5 Support in Android 2.2 Froyo Browser

We all know that HTML5 has started kicking off and the consumers are drooling over their IPhones, IPads and Android devices. Now these platforms have a very good browser with many great features. In todays world creating an application which doesn’t support these platforms should be considered as crime :).

Now the question is as a developer do we need to start learning each of these platforms or can’t we just target the browser and bother about different types of devices like mobile or tablets because what really is going to change is just the view which needs to be catered as per the real state of the device.

Specially if we see the HTML5 specification we get most of the things we require to build an application (e.g. Storage, Richer Controls, Geo Location API’s, Messaging API’s etc…). What is just needed is a web server to serve the request which is actually a good thing to ensure that the user is always running the latest version of the application and we are not bothered about supporting multiple device specific versions.

Thinking of that I started getting curious about the HTML5 support in mobile browser (I am currently using Samsung Galaxy S with Android 2.2 Froyo and I simply love it…). So I fired up the browser on my Samsung Galaxy S and went to the site http://html5test.com/ and was quite impressed with the result as all the base components which are required to write an business application are already supported.

Below screenshots are taken from my device showing the complete result of HTML5 Test:

Now I am not sure whether the comments made in this blog post actually makes sense but its just the thought process which is coming up in the mind specially considering the fact that applications built today have to make sure their UI works fine on these different platforms across different devices.

Any thoughts or comments will be appreciated.

Thanks…