Robin Jewsbury's Forum Nokia Blog - Cloud Cuckoo Land - the new Apps versus WebApps story

Re: Webapps

cell phone news

hi does anyone of you how to make webapp excutable standalone especially php apps.
and thank you for your article Robin.

What if the native fragmentation goes away?

Sorcery-ltd

Interesting, while I agree that the web technologies will probably never fragment as badly as native options today, from where I'm sitting I see the native options getting less fragmented. Actually I think there may even come a day where you can write standard C/C++ and a Qt UI almost everywhere.

Fundamentally I dislike the web app concept for mobile platforms, it's wasteful of power and bandwidth, but the advantage of having complete control of the version all your users run and the ability to update that immediately everywhere is too difficult to ignore.

I wonder if the compromise might be something like a web scripted UI that is fully updateable online but cached, running with a native backend that is controlled by the developer, not the device manufacturer or browser vendor, using something like the Qt Webkit integration (if you haven't seen it take a look - it's pretty amazing).

Mark

Re:Webapps are not everything

robin.jewsbury

I agree. There is a reason why each technology exists. The BBC S60 iPlayer app is ideal as an app because its so good you would want to come back to it again and again. But this installable app is based on webapp technology so the arguments get blurred.

And you are also right about fragmentation but the extent of the fragmentation with HTML/Javascript/CSS will never be as great as with Native apps today. So there are advantages here and clever developers will build abstraction layers which will reduce some of the fragmentation.

Webapps are not everything

tote_b5

Hi,

Although I can see (most of) the advantages of webapps I do not think they're the ultimate answer to everything. First off, the technology might be advanced (it is NOT), but tariffs are still so high that users are not willing to use webapps doing extensive data transfer.

Second, there are simply tasks that cannot be done with webapps architecture - usually those that rather require local (i.e. on-device) computing power than afford data being transmitted to back-end server and waiting for result coming over the network.

Thirdly, fragmentation will reach webapps solutions as well. Never think that those big players that you mentioned above will ever agree on a standard to get contacts, access gps, manipulate calendar, etc. so that you can write HTML/JavaScript/CSS/etc. code relying on a single version of the relevant APIs. And eventually it will make the life of developers just as hard as it is today for native apps.

All in all, again, I can see why it is worth writing webapps - I'm just saying that it's not the ultimate solution and imho it will never be.