Posts Tagged ‘jQuery’

The mobile web is important to target as internet users increasingly access websites via smartphones and other mobile devices.

When developing for mobile devices, a couple main alternatives present themselves:

• target each device individually (a separate app for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.)
• target each device with a mobile website which functions on multiple platforms/browsers

A number of frameworks have begun to emerge in this space to ease the process of developing mobile sites with cross-platform support.

Frameworks for Mobile Website Development:

• jQuery Mobile
• Sencha Touch
• SproutCore

Each of these frameworks take different approaches, but their end goals are the same: make it easy for web developers to provide a good user experience for their website or web application on a wide range of mobile devices. If you’re looking to do so, I’d recommend looking into these three mobile frameworks as potential solutions.

I had the opportunity today to hear from several speakers including Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!), James Pearce (Sencha), Tom Dale (SproutCore), and Dan Heberden (jQuery).

I’m including slides from some of the talks and I’ll add others as they’re made available.

High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas

Building cross platform mobile web apps by James Pearce

Today, Amazon hosted a jQuery Hack Attack in Seattle. John Resig, jQuery creator, provided the keynote presentation and contributed one of the open talks. Below, I include notes on the keynote regarding jQuery mobile browser suppoort and the three sessions I attended.

John Resig ~ “I want to give developers the smallest toolset they need to build the best sites possible.”

jQuery Mobile: Notes from John Resig’s Talk

Mobile JavaScript gains increasing importance as more and more smartphones with JavaScript support are shipped to consumers. jQuery intends to support the most popular mobile web browsers and devices.

One difficulty when defining what browsers and devices to support is gathering data regarding mobile browser marketshare and version information. Large sites such as Yahoo! have this information, but have not released it to the public. Typically, these sites see the statistics as a competitive advantage and as a result have not released the data to the public.

Resig currently gathers data regarding mobile browsers from StatCounter (web statics gathered from over 1 billion pageviews) and Gartner (device sales statistics).
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