I was just looking at the Android SDK web site last night. It's not that I'm
interested in developing stand-alone or thick-client applications for Droid, but
I read that the emulator bundled with the SDK also supports browser emulation.
That may work better for me initially. I don't have a mobile device to develop
/ test with yet.
Our desktop user interfaces would simply not be suitable for cell phone screens;
they're barely passable on iPad, which I played with for a few minutes at the
Apple store. We pack a lot of data and navigation in a minimum 1024X768
footprint. But we're interested in offering appropriately sized data inquiry
and maintenance panels for mobile devices, so that parents, students, teachers,
and administrators might use their client of choice to access the IBM i
database. We're also interested in using HTML 5 / CSS 3 elements and styles
which mobile devices allegedly support.
I initially worried about the amount of additional programming that might be
required to support both desktop and mobile clients. But now I don't see that
as a major hurdle.
-Nathan
From: Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sat, October 9, 2010 2:38:26 PM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Microsoft .NET frontending IBM i
Nathan Andelin wrote:
I'm interested in supporting mobile browsers, and one thing that fuels that
interest is that we listened to industry thought leaders about modularizing
code
under an MVC model, and we can now see potentially across-the-board reuse of
our
server components to support mobile devices in addition to desktop clients.
Well theoretically at least everything you do for the web is available
for the mobile devices, at least in the sense that most devices have
browsers. As long as you code to industry standard browser
functionality and not IE, you're going to be golden, with the caveat
that you half to code for smaller screens.
The real interesting bit though will be the thick client mobile
application. I'm sticking with Android for the time being simply
because it's all about Java (yet one more reason Java is the best
language for an RPG programmer to learn). I may delve back into the
iPhone, but for now the Droid is cool - especially since you can
download and install a complete Droid emulation environment and SDK for
free!
Joe
midrange.com
