Survival of Mobile Ajax

There are more than a billion of mobile phones today and the number just keeps on rising. The increasing capabilities of mobile phones (not to mention the knock offs) have considerably reduced the prices of phones with simpler but basic capabilities.

High end mobile phones with PC-like capability are increasing. Apple has reported that their iPhone and has been sold to more than a millions customers in US alone.

The number could greatly increase if you consider other mobile phone companies and other countries. The high end phone is slowly being accepted as the standard phone today because of price and availability.

Because of increasing number of high end mobile phone, the demand for developing an Ajax based application for mobile phones is getting clearer. However, Ajax developers are always finding themselves in trouble in building an Ajax based application for mobile phone.

All they could do is to rely on online applications which can only be accessed by very expensive and high end mobile phones such as iPhone or HTC Touch.

Other mobile phones cannot handle regular websites because their mobile browsers cannot access Ajax based applications. Developers have to think of a way in increasing accessibility of Ajax based websites in mobile phones.

The answer to this problem is in API. Online applications for regular browsers can never be read by any mobile browser so the smart thing to do is to build an application with an API for mobile phones.

An interactive API can access other applications in the mobile phone such as its camera or phone book. It can be built to access these applications so that API can be interactive with the website.

Aside from an API for accessibility of the Ajax based website, developers should take a cue from Flash so that their websites can be accessed in mobile phones.

In addition to developing a smaller mobile-friendly Ajax application, developers should also build a plug-in to be installed in the mobile browser so that it could help reading the application. This might go beyond the basic goal of Ajax since JavaScript and Ajax is intended to be launched without any prerequisites.

Just like Flash, developers need to build a plug-in to be installed in the mobile phone so that it can help reading the Ajax based application. If the online application has an API, it can work flawlessly in the mobile phone.

There are clearly a lot of requirements just to get Ajax launched in mobile phones. But the sheer number of developers working on Ajax is good sign that Ajax will be easily launched in the smaller platform. To help the developers, the OpenAjax Alliance has also released documentations to assist developers address this concern.

For now, Ajax can be launched mostly in very powerful mobile phones which have regular browsers that can handle regular websites. It can take months or years before an application could be easily launched in simpler mobile phones but it will happen.