Mobile Development Concerns

[Matt Priour]

I've written up an internal position statement about some concerns I have regarding our current and future mobile and multi-platform development strategies.

Bart suggested that I share this with you all and find out if:

1. You see the same problems on the horizon?
2. Have you formed any kind of a strategy to deal with them?
3. Do you see any of the approaches that I outlined as worthy of real investigation?
4. Can you think of any alternative approaches that would be good to investigate that I have not listed?

Since there was so much cross-organizational development effort devoted to GeoExt and even the recent GeoExt 2 update, it seems like it would benifit us all to come up with good cross-platform, multi-device strategy that we can begin working towards as a team.

https://docs.google.com/a/opengeo.org/document/d/1Smj18hl11yabjj_YZz0XRkVvRIaQvZPNjbgSR0uo5D4/edit

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Matt Priour

OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/

Expert service straight from the developers

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Here is a recent comparison on JQuery Mobile versus Sencha Touch:

http://css.dzone.com/articles/sencha-touch-v-jquery-mobile

Best regards,

Bart

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Bart van den Eijnden
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.

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http://groups.google.com/a/opengeo.org/group/js

[Matt Priour]

I would tend to disagree with:

1. A few of the statements regarding stuttering flow and animations.
• The same problems are generally evident in both jqm & ST2 on Android 2.x & 3.x devices. These problems were far worse before jqm 1.1 and have been even further improved in 1.2
• There is a documented workaround (a single css directive) for the animation issue on jqm
• Test http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.2.0/docs/pages/page-transitions.html on an Android device and Slide, SlideFade, and None are the only transitions that don't look ugly or cause reflow problems
• Test http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.2.0/docs/pages/page-transitions-flash-workaround.html on an Android device and all of the transitions look nice
2. The difficulty of doing unique styling of elements in jQM
• The provided themes and the ThemeRoller and get you any color combinations quite easily.
• There are a few themes available which look nothing like default jQM or iOS
• Drupal - http://drupal.org/project/mobile_jquery
• Blackberry - http://blackberry.github.com/jQueryMobile-BB10-Theme/kitchenSink/index.html
• Metro - http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/colin/2012/04/introducing-the-jquery-mobile-metro-theme/
• See the Metro theme in action here: http://mpriour.github.com/jqm-metro (the one linked to above always looks like default jQM unless you have a windows phone)
3. jQueryMobile is basically just for simple forms and pages
• First, a fullscreen, single page web app with navigation buttons, toolbars, list/tables, and form elements covers 99% of our use cases. So even if it was true, I don't see it as a strong negative.
• If you want to do more (Slideshows, card games, etc...) you can find examples of that
• Checkout http://www.jqmgallery.com/ or http://jquerymobile.com/resources/#Inspiration for some real world mobile apps, most of which look nothing like out-of-the-box jQM

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