Ajax Girl

Ryan Breen has been reading our coverage on the iPhone and has some opinions that he lays out in defense of Ajax for the iPhone.

He comments on the latency issues, how offline storage can come into play, the place for Ajax frameworks, access to “native” features, and community, finishing with:

But perhaps the most important factor behind the inevitability of Ajax for the iPhone is the way it opens development to such a broad community. Traditional mobile application development, with its ‘Real SDKs,’ is restricted to the few with the time or inclination to develop for a specific device. The iPhone’s model means that anyone with the time and inclination to build a web application is an iPhone developer. Certainly there will be a spectrum of applications, from web applications you happen to use on an iPhone to those that have been tuned for the interaction model and presentational features of the iPhone, but again, frameworks should make it easy for all developers to move towards the end of the spectrum that approximates native applications.

The iPhone is one of the first mobile devices, and definitely the first with a cell phone form factor, to provide a true browsing experience. But in a few years I expect all mobile devices to provide the same browsing experience. With that, the line between traditional and mobile web development will further blur, with Ajax frameworks helping developers deliver consistent and appropriate experiences on each.

All good stuff. Although I bet some of the Nokia guys, with their WebKit phones and saying “look at me!”.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/127664810/in-defense-of-ajax-for-the-iphone