What I learned at AJAXWorld

Last Monday I ran into Manhattan for a day to attend a little bit ofAJAXWorld. I just bought a day pass so I could go to Ajit Jaokar’s talk, “Deploying Web-Based Applications to Mobile Devices Using AJAX Techniques“, but I also got to run around to some booths.

Things I learned:

• Laszlo is working with Sun to be able to compile Laszlo AJAX apps to run as J2ME.
• Adobe Apollo is going mobile… at some point. When I pressed about how they see Apollo and Flash Lite competing, I couldn’t get a straight answer.

Ajit’s talk was great – a nice primer of why, when and a little bit of how to use mobile AJAX. Of course Soonr was used as the golden child of mobile AJAX, but it just emphasized the big mobile browser fragmentation problem. All the cool AJAXy stuff doesn’t work on my Windows Mobile device, but yet Pocket IE claims to have limited AJAX support.

What it basically comes down to is browsers claiming “AJAX!” when they really just support XMLHttpRequest, but don’t have the depth of Javascript support or DOM manipulation to back it up.

So the big question of “Will the mobile web be a unifying element on phones?” in my opinion is still not answered – even though Ajit thinks that browsers will evolve and standardize to make it so. Right now, to play the mobile AJAX game, you’re limited to Opera (not mini), Nokia’s S60 and up browsers, and… um.. Yeah that’s it.

Then there’s the iPhone. Disruptive? Oh yes, but in what way we don’t know yet. If they really just throw full-blown Safari on a mobile, you are really limited by CPU horsepower and battery drain. Try running GMail and Google Maps on a battery-driven device for a while an all that asynchronous network updating will suck it dry. So there is still a need to create a nice mobile AJAX standard to optimize for these types of devices.

Will WICD’s mobile profile become that standard? It’s still super early, but I’ll let you decide. Check out this primer by Daniel Appelquist. What about AHAH? Sure it limits what you can do on the device, but simplifying asynchronous updates to just blocks of XHTML certainly addresses power consumption. Forget about your cool real-time image zooming in the browser though.

So what would I pick right now if I don’t want to become a porting house? Straight XHTML. If you can figure out a streamlined, simple UI for your service that can get your logic completely serverside – do it.

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