Blog

As the demand rises for mobile apps, more and more developers are biting the bullet, so to speak, and trying their hand at developing in yet another environment.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since the job of the web developer or software engineer is constantly changing and thus we need to change with it or become obsolete.  But what if we did not have to change this time?

The people over at Sencha have created a plug-in for jquery, called jqtouch, that will allow us to use all the html knowledge that we have to build an application that will look and feel exactly like a native application.  The twist is that it will be a full web page hosted on your normal web server.

You might ask if something like this can be done for a high level app that is currently on the market.  For that, I would point you to an article found on Ajaxian.com “Will Native Mobile Application Wither Away?”  The article contains links to a case study that James Pearce did to recreate the BBC News application for the iPad.  It’s a good in-depth look at how a web app is built in just html.

The web development method has many pros to the web development world, but there are a couple of cons that need to be pointed out:

Pros:

 
• The first and most obvious is that you will not need to learn a new way of development.  You can use all the current web and html knowledge you have to build the new application.
 
• Second pro is the tools that you can use to create these apps.  With the iPhone, you must be using a Mac in order to develop new apps.  With this, any current web tools you have will work just fine.
 
• No matter which phone you are using, as long as it has a web browser, your application will work.

Cons:

 
• The application will not be an actual native app, it will be nothing more than a link to a mobile specific web page.  This means it won’t have access to every feature of the specific device, just the basic ones such as swipe and page orientation.
 
• If you want to charge for the application, you’ll need to develop your own way of getting credit card information.

With the above pros and cons, does this mean that we should run to the web for all our mobile apps?  I would say probably not, but it’s a great alternative to dealing with either market place and, for people like me, a much easier way of developing a new app.