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Today’s Web 2.0 applications (think Facebook and Twitter) go far beyond the confines of the desktop and are widely used on mobile devices. The mobile Web has become incredibly popular given the success of the iPhone and BlackBerry, the importance of Windows Mobile, and the emergence of Palm Pre (and its webOS platform). At Apress, we are fortunate to have Gail Frederick of the well-known training site Learn the Mobile Web offer her expert advice in Beginning Smartphone Web Development. In this book, Gail teaches the web standards and fundamentals specific to smartphones and other feature-driven mobile phones and devices.

• Shows you how to build interactive mobile web sites using web technologies optimized for browsers in smartphones
• Details markup fundamentals, design principles, content adaptation, usability, and interoperability
• Explores cross-platform standards and best practices for the mobile Web authored by the W3C, dotMobi, and similar organizations
• Dives deeps into the feature sets of the most popular mobile browsers, including WebKit, Chrome, Palm Pre webOS, Pocket IE, Opera Mobile, and Skyfire

By the end of this book, you’ll have the training, tools, and techniques for creating robust mobile web experiences on any of these platforms for your favorite smartphone or other mobile device.

What you’ll learn

• Build interactive mobile web pages that comply with industry standards and best practices.
• Develop web sites using the markup languages of the mobile Web: XHTML-MP, Wireless CSS, and WML.
• Use Mobile JavaScript and Ajax for client-side web interactivity.
• Adapt the syntax and design of mobile web pages to target smartphone models.
• Enhance mobile web pages to target advanced features of smartphone browsers.
• Validate and compress mobile markup to optimize for network transmission and browser performance.
• Simulate smartphone browsers using emulators and development tools.

Who this book is for

Mobile application developers and their managers need to learn mobile web technologies because it’s in their economic interest. Time-to-market and opportunity costs are significantly lower for web-based mobile applications than for native ones.

Desktop web developers at software companies and IT departments of non-technology businesses need to learn mobile web technologies to meet the demands of managers who will soon be asking them to “mobilize this web site.” These developers will want to do the minimum work possible to maximize the compatibility of their mobile web sites. The standards-based approach advocated in this book will allow them to build gracefully adaptive and portable mobile web experiences that perform well across mobile browser platforms.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Mobile Web Development
2. Set Up Your Mobile Web Development Environment
3. Mobile Markup Languages
4. Device Awareness and Content Adaptation
5. Adding Interactivity with JavaScript and AJAX
6. Mobile Web Usability
7. Enhancing Mobile Web Pages for Smartphone Browsers
8. Optimizing Mobile Markup
9. Validating Mobile Markup
10. Testing a Mobile Web Site
11. Deploying a Mobile Web Site
12. How to Play Well in the Mobile Ecosystem
13. The Future of the Mobile Web

As the Web has moved onto mobile devices, developers have told themselves a lot of stories about what this means for their work. While some of those stories are true, others are misleading, confusing, or even dangerous.

It’s not the mobile web; it’s just the Web!

I’ve heard this quote many times in the last few years, and it’s true. It’s really the same Web. Think about your life. You don’t have another email account just for your mobile. (OK, I know some guys that do, but I believe that’s not typical!)

You read about the last NBA game on your favorite site, like ESPN; you don’t have a desktop news source and a different mobile news source. You really don’t want another social network for your mobile; you want to use the same Facebook or Twitter account as the one you used on your desktop. It was painful enough creating your friends list on your desktop, you’ve already ignored many people…you don’t want to have to do all that work again on your mobile.

For all of these purposes, the mobile web uses the same network protocols as the whole Internet: HTTP, HTTPS, POP3, Wireless LAN, and even TCP/IP. OK, you can say that GSM, CDMA, and UMTS are not protocols used in the desktop web environment, but they are communication protocols operating at lower layers. From our point of view, from a web application approach, we are using the same protocols.

So, yes…it’s the same Web. However, when developing for the mobile web we are targeting very, very different devices. The most obvious difference is the screen size, and yes, that will be our first problem. But there are many other not-so-obvious differences. One issue is that the contexts in which we use our mobile devices are often extremely different from where and how we use our comfortable desktops or even our laptops and netbooks.

Don’t get me wrong--this doesn’t mean that, as developers, we need to create two, three, or dozens of versions duplicating our work. In this book, we are going to analyze all the techniques available for this new world. Our objective will be to make only one product, and we’ll analyze the best way to do it.

You don’t need to do anything special about your desktop website.

Almost every smartphone on the market today--for example, the iPhone and Android-based devices--can read and display full desktop websites. Yes, this is true. Users want the same experience on the mobile web as they have on their desktops. Yes, this is also true. Some statistics even indicate that users tend to choose web versions over mobile versions when using a smartphone.

However, is this because we really love zooming in and out, scrolling and crawling for the information we want, or is it because the mobile versions are really awful and don’t offer the right user experience? I’ve seen a lot of mobile sites consisting of nothing but a logo and a couple of text links. My smartphone wants more!

One website should work for all devices (desktop, mobile, TV, etc.).

As we will see, there are techniques that allow us to create only one file but still provide different experiences on a variety of devices, including desktops, mobiles, TVs, and game consoles. This vision is called “One Web.” This is to an extent possible today, but the vision won’t fully be realized for years to come. Today, there are a lot of mobile devices with very low connection speeds and limited resources--non--smartphones—that, in theory, can read and parse any file, but will not provide the best user experience and will have compatibility and performance problems if we deliver the same document as for desktop. Therefore, One Web remains a goal for the future. A little additional work is still required to provide the right user experience for each mobile device, but there are techniques that can be applied to reduce the work required and avoid code and data duplication.

Mobile web is really easy; Just create a WML file.

I’m really surprised how many mobile websites are still developed using a technology deprecated many years ago: WML (Wireless Markup Language). Even in emerging markets, there are almost no WML-only web-capable devices on the market today. The worst part of this story is that these developers think that this is the markup language for the mobile web. Wrong! WML development was called mobile web (or WAP) development a couple of years ago, when the first attempt at building a mobile web was made. There are still a small proportion of WML-only devices available in some markets, but WML is definitely not the mobile web today.

Just create an HTML file with a width of 240 Pixels, and you have a mobile website.

This is the other fast-food way to think about the mobile web. Today, there are more than 3,000 mobile devices on the market, with almost 30 different browsers (actually, more than 300 different browsers if we separate them by version number). Creating one HTML file as your mobile website will be a very unsuccessful project. In addition, doing so contributes to the belief that mobile web browsing is not useful.

Native mobile applications will kill the mobile web.

Every solution has advantages and disadvantages. The mobile web has much to offer native applications, as Chapter 12 of this book will demonstrate. The mobile web (and the new concept of mobile widgets) offers us a great multi-device application platform, including local applications that don’t require an always-connected Web with URLs and browsers.

People are not using their mobile browsers.

How many Internet connections are there in the world?

1,802,330,457 (26% of the world’s population) at the beginning of 2010 (http://www.internetworldstats.com)

How many people have mobile devices?

4,600,000,000 (68% of the population) at the beginning of 2010 (U.N. Telecommunications Agency, http://www.itu.int)

So, one of the reasons why people are not using their mobile browsers may be because of us, the web producers. We are not offering them what they need. There are other factors, but let’s talk about what we can do from our point of view.

Today, less than 4% of total web browsing is done from mobile devices. This percentage is increasing month by month. Mobile browsing may never become as popular as desktop browsing, but it will increase a lot in the following years.

In addition, user browsing on mobile devices will likely have a higher conversion rate. How many tabs do you usually have open at once in Internet Explorer or Firefox on your desktop or laptop? On a mobile device, when you browse you are more specific and more likely to act on what you find.

Mobile is the hottest thing going—and developing content for mobile devices and browsers is even hotter than that.  This book is your guide to it all—how to design, build, and deploy sites, blogs and services that will work brilliantly for mobile users. You’ll learn about the state-of-the-art of mobile web development, the tools available to use, and the best practices for creating compelling mobile user interfaces. Then, using the most popular content management systems, WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, you’ll learn how to building world-class mobile web sites from existing platforms and content..  The book walks you through each platform, including how to use third-party plug-ins and themes, explains the strategies for writing your own logic, how to switch between mobile and desktop, and much more.

• Provides a technical review of the mobile landscape and acquaints you with  a range of mobile devices and networks
• Covers topics common to all platforms, including site topologies, switching between mobile and desktop, common user interface patterns, and more
• Walks you through each content management platform—WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal—first focusing on standard plug-ins and themes and then exploring advanced techniques for writing your own themes or logic
• Explains the best practices for testing, deploying, and integrating a mobile web site
• Also explores analytics, m-commerce, and SEO techniques for mobile

Get ahead of the the mobile web development curve with this professional and in-depth reference guide!

BlackBerry Planet tells the behind-the-scenes story of how this little device has become the machine that connects the planet. Starting with the early years of Mike Lazaridis’ invention and his founding of RIM at age 23, it details his drive to innovate, developing what was a glorified pager into the essential corporate communicator, used by everyone from dealmakers to the Queen, from movie stars to the entire US Congress. Since 1992, Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie together have been the driving force behind the RIM story.

With access to senior staffers and former RIM employees, BlackBerry Planet tells the inside story about the branding and marketing success of the BlackBerry, from its use during 9/11, which earned RIM a reputation for security and reliability, to the cultural adoption of the iconic device as a must-have symbol, to the backlash against the addictive properties of the “CrackBerry,” and the various patent suits RIM has had to fight off – including the five-year court battle that resulted in the largest technology patent settlement in US history.

As the incredible story of the BlackBerry unfolds, and as RIM battles global giants like Nokia and Apple in the emerging super-phone marketplace, users, fans, investors and competitors can look to BlackBerry Planet for the insight and context of where they’ve been, to try and predict where they’re going.