The phenomenal rise in the use of mobile devices in course of the last few years have no doubt made developers go mad in frustration, wondering whether businesses in future would require websites as also mobile Apps to survive. This blog post, however,  will throw some valuable light as to why in future HTML5, CSS and JavaScript applications will work equally well on most mobile platforms.Incidentally, while some developers have decided that they should focus only on particular mobile platform, such as iPhone, Windows 7 or Android, others have come to realize that there are quite a good many development tools which may permit them to take advantage of their know-how, irrespective of whether it is HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or just programming languages like C or C++.

Mobile Web App Development Tools

‘PhoneGap’ is a mobile development framework produced by Nitobi, purchased by Adobe Systems. It enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, instead of device-specific languages such as Objective-C or Java. It also enables developers to take advantage of the core features of iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry Smartphone’s that include geo-location, accelerometer, contacts and vibration (sound). However, even though PhoneGap is free, it requires supplementary software specific to the platform meant for development, such as iPhone SDK for iPhone, Android SDK for Android, etc.

However, there are others, such as ‘Rhodes’ that allow developers to build native apps for most mobile platforms that include iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android and Symbian. But here also, you need to compile the code for each platform individually. Nevertheless, it supports the native features of almost all Smartphone’s that include geo-location, camera-image capture and contacts. For your information, ‘Rhodes’ is free under MIT License. A cloud computing service known as ‘RhoHub’ empowers developers to develop apps online by using the ‘Rhodes’ framework, sans any need for the SDKs for each platform. As a matter of fact, apps are created using HTML and Ruby, while these are actually built in the cloud.

More Development Tools

As of late, some of the developers have become fairly aroused by the idea of apps development by using technologies that can work across all known platforms. One such tool, ‘iUI’ (iPhone User Interface) Framework uses JavaScript, HTML and CSS to crate web applications that work on any browser, as long as it has HTML5 support. Even though it was designed to build apps having the look and feel of any native application built with iPhone SDK, those created using iUI is guaranteed to work on practically all Smartphone’s.

Yet another mobile development tool is ‘Sencha Touch’, also a HTML5 Mobile App Framework. Similar to iUI, it is powered by HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. It works on the Android, iPhone and iPad platforms, as also other HTML5-compliant web browsers. It also supports touch events that include pinching and stretching and can either be web-based or wrapped in an Objective-C layer for distribution on mobile app stores. Since Sencha Touch is open source software, when you are developing an open source app with a license compatible with the GNU GPL License v3, you can use it for free.     

Will Web Apps Ultimately Become the Pennant?

Sometime ago, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) returned to work on the HTML5 specification after a break of several years. However, this had created tensions with the ‘Web Hypertext Application Working Group (WHATWG), a group of browser makers (including Opera Software, Mozilla, and Apple) who began work on the standard in June 2004. Ian Hickson, who is the editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the Candidate Recommendation stage during 2014, but doesn’t expect it to become an official W3C Recommendation until the year 2022 or later.

As for the good news – Since all the major mobile platforms, including Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS use similar WebKit-based browsers, so technologies like HTML5 and CSS 3 will continue to be improved and supported. Even Microsoft is coming to the plate with support for HTML 5 forthcoming in MSIE 9. Though it may not become an official pennant for a decade, it is increasingly being supported by the major browser vendors, and more sites and services, such as YouTube Mobile, Google Gmail, Scribd, and Apple’s iPhone and iPad are using HTML 5 instead of plugins such as Adobe’s Flash. Therefore, HTML 5 is here to stay.