Is Ajax suitable for mobile devices? ICEfaces
certainly is. We were inspired by Bashar's
investigations with a Dell
AXIM 50v running Windows
Mobile 5. Just as he found, we had little success with Internet
Explorer, but mobile Opera
8.65 worked very well, including Ajax Push. We were able to chat
with desktop users with perceived latency on the order of 1 second or
less.
Here's the ICEfaces
Auction Monitor running on an HTC
P4000 with Windows Mobile 5.
And here's ICEfaces.org
(also an Ajax site, just not using Ajax Push)
In related testing, we used the P4000 as a USB
modem. (It's just a matter of installing the driver and entering phonenumber@1x.telusmobility.com
as your username and the 11 digit device ID as your password). Here, we
could use a standard Firefox browser with a 115kbps internet connection.
Since ICEfaces determines the minimal page changes on the server, even a
dialup connection is suitable for Ajax (admittedly this particular
wireless connection is very fast for dialup; in fact, it was hard to
tell that a wireless connection was being used).
In general, the greatest flaw with the ICEfaces Auction Monitor in the
mobile setting was the fact that the page design expected a resolution
of at least 800x600 (much larger than the available 320x240).
Additionally, this particular application pushes updates to the page
very frequently; clearly this should be reduced for users paying per bit
transferred.
In terms of enhancing ICEfaces for mobile applications, we will be
starting with the following:
-
testing on other mobile browsers, in particular the WebKit-based
Nokia browser and the iPhone
-
testing whether data compression is suitable for mobile applications
(what's good for the mobile network may not be good for the mobile CPU)
-
optimizing ICEfaces javascript for mobile browsers to improve
performance and reduce power consumption
-
APIs for tuning Ajax Push to mobile users
-
Customized versions of ICEfaces demos for smaller screens
-
Running ICEfaces with Seam on JBoss 4.2 on a cell phone (just kidding)
WR) or no JavaScript
(ICEfaces).
