Open Source to the Rescue of Mobile App and Mobile Web Fragmentation

Open Source to the Rescue of Mobile App and Mobile Web Fragmentation? (short summary of the OSCON BoF session) Tom Deryckere Software Architect / Siruna @twom

This is not a presentation!

Report on the BoF session on OSCON Monday 20 july 2009

Mail me if you have additions to this report.

What’s this

Professional Open Source company

Located in Belgium | UK | US | India | UAE | China

http://www.siruna.com

Siruna helps you to make anything mobile on any device with total peace of mind.

Siruna Website XML Feed

OSCON unique chance to meet fellow developers

Discuss current state of Open Source tools for mobile developers

Do they provide solutions to overcome device fragmentation?

Networking and Exchange ideas and experiences

Publish outcome after OSCON

Why a BoF session

Browser companies

http://www.skyfire.com/ : executing websites on the server to take the load of mobile devices:

http://www.obigo.com : full featured mobile web browser supporting most standards including the BONDI / W3C specs

Application developers / consultants

Game developer with need for some power (going for the navit app appraoch, mainly on one platform – iPhone). Used to develop J2ME but sees a lot of fragmentation in this world..

Handset manufacturers

Samsung working with open source operating systems based on desktop gnome

Consumer companies

Looking at extending sales channel and promoting products through mobile

Medical records access from mobile devices for underdeveloped countries

Open source adepts

Open source companies

http://www.siruna.com

....

Who was around the table

Problem of fragmentation

How to develop applications that run on different devices / platforms

What platforms are there and what fragmentation does a developer needs to overcome

Which tools are available to help

Mobile web development

What standards do we have

What standards should we adopt

Problem of javascript UI libraries that are not mobile friendly

Problem of flash

Transcoding solutions

Device detection (very shortly)

What was discussed

Has always been a developer challenge

J2ME used to be a solution

Currently fragmentation on J2ME is to big

Fragmentation on two fronts

Device capabilities: screen size, GPS, touch, accelerometer, CPU, bluetooth, ....

Operating system: webOS, WinMo, Java, Android, iPhone, Symbian, ...

Other?

Puts difficult choices on developers

E.g. What platforms to develop for

Fragmentation

Some numbers (AdMob) United States Handset Data - April 2009 Requests: 3,538,714,000 More: http://metrics.admob.com/

Red: percentage of web request coming from the phone

Blue: percentage of total sold mobile devices

Numbers

Platforms Platform Language iPhone Objective C Android Java (Dalvik JVM) Windows mobile .NET / C++ / Java Nokia C++, java, Flash lite Palm Pre HTML / CSS / javascript With own touch (services api + widgets) What some would call widgets. Blackberry Java Browser HTML / CSS / javascript W3C standards, limitations

It is not only that mobile need to evolve to ‘desktop functionality’

Mobile browsers are more and more desktop like

HTML / CSS / javascript capabilities

Problem lies not in capability, but in layouting and making javascript gui’s that make sence on mobile

Mobile browser need mobile specific functionality

Access to GPS (not standard available on desktop browsers)

Access to camera, contact list, file system, etc ...

Mobile javascript based UI libraries

BONDI project is addressing this issue

Desktop versus mobile

HTML / CSS / javascript gains momentum and is heading towards a middleware language to run on all devices

PhoneGap already brings this in reality

More platforms/browsers are supporting it

Webkit!

BONDI

Industry initiative defining interfaces to access mobile device resources (calender, camera, file system, location)

Standardisation versus open tools

Open Source project making a mobile device database available as xml file

Get device capabilities

Screen size

Which html standards

Javascript

Video capabilities

...

API’s for Java, PHP

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/

WURFL

http://ready.mobi

Test on objective paramters/site semantics -> not always linked to how well a site works

No Open Source

Adobe device central (only for flash?)

Yospace.com

Crowdsourcing based testing companies

Mob4hire.com

Mobile testing

Use html / CSS / javascript to build applications

UI

Iphone / android / BlackBerry

Access to native functionality

Geo location

Vibration

Accelerometer

Sound

Contact support

Camera

Under development

http://phonegap.com/

PhoneGAP

Mobile web

Content adaptation engine

Multi-platform distribution

Takes online content and formats it for mobile

Semi automatic: using an xml based scripting language + adaptation engine

Device detection, image transcoding, CSS adaptation, content selection, ...

Manage different versions of one site for different device categories

Other open source example: Morfeo

http://www.siruna.com / http://open.siruna.com / http://composer.siruna.com

Siruna

Web browser engine (both mobile / desktop)

Nokia

Safari

Android

Palm Pre

QT

Contributing to WebKit can change the mobile web!

http://webkit.org/

WebKit

Open Source operating systems (Symbian, Android, ....)

iPhone application development

Open source scripting for mobile

Python runs on different devices

Widgets

Often HTML/CSS/javascript based web application

....

What we did not talk about

Mail : [email_address]

Blog: http://www.mobiledrupal.com

Twitter: @twom, @siruna

Siruna: http://www.siruna.com , http://open.siruna.com

Contact

Open Source to the Rescue of Mobile App and Mobile Web Fragmentation

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