Thursday, 18 October 2007
ICEfaces And Mobile Ajax
We have been pretty involved with exploring the applicability of ICEfaces in the Mobile Ajax space recently, so wanted to keep everyone in the loop. As it turns out, given our existing support for the mobile Opera and Safari browsers we have a pretty good story around mobile ICEfaces applications today. In fact, we have a customer, C3 Solutions, that has already developed a mobile enterprise system based on ICEfaces. Ted also blogged here about ICEfaces on the iPhone recently, illustrating a number of our demo applications running.
Key to ICEfaces suitability for Mobile Ajax applications is the server-centric nature of the framework. To begin with, the application runs as a pure JSF application, so the server does all the heavy lifting, utilizing only the lightweight Ajax bridge to facilitate the Ajax interactions. Regardless of application complexity, with ICEfaces, the client side of the deployment is a fixed, lightweight piece of JavaScript that is well-suited to resource-constrained mobile devices, provided they support a modern mobile browser.
We also see Ajax Push as a key feature for mobile applications, as it makes it feasible to updated the client in real time without the user needing to interact with the device. Despite improvements in interaction mechanisms you find in devices like the iPhone, they remain awkward to interact with, so reducing the need for interaction is critical to developing effective mobile applications.
I recently did a talk on ICEfaces and Mobile Ajax at AjaxWorld and demonstrated a couple of mobile ICEfaces applications at the show. We went to the painstaking effort to record these demos and they are now available for your viewing pleasure here. You will see the prominence of Ajax Push in both the demos, so make sure you have a look. If you are interested in viewing the slide deck that was presented, you can grab it here. I will also be giving at talk at WEB Builder 2.0 on the same subject in Vegas on Dec 3, so if you are planning on attending you can track me down there.
While the demos are wireless mobile demos, the process of capturing them on video was far from wireless as the photo below illustrates.
Right after AjaxWorld, the OpenAjax Alliance and W3C cosponsored a workshop on Mobile Ajax, and I was lucky enough to be one of the attendees. There was a vast cross-section of the industry represented there and a wide range of discussion topics. While it was a tremendously interesting day, it is unlikely that anything concrete will come from this gathering in the near term. I think that once again Moore's Law will have a bigger impact on penetration of Ajax technologies into the mobile space than standards initiatives ever will. But why wait when you can deliver in the mobile space today with ICEfaces?
I will keep you posted on new developments around ICEfaces and Mobile Ajax as they arise.
Steve
Posted by at 6:57 PM in Entries by Steve Maryka