If you are attending or speaking at Mobile Web Americas too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

My position paper is about the Frost Ajax library. The only other position paper I have come accross is the one from Mark Baker of Coactus Consulting. It’s entitled “The best mobile Ajax application … is the one that’s never written“, so there’s probably gonna be some interesting discussions.

• What is Mobile Ajax?
• Is there a Mobile Ajax checklist/minimum requirements?
• What does Mobile Ajax look like?
• Why should one do Ajax on mobile phones / what problem does it solve?
• What are the options to Mobile Ajax?
• How do Flash Lite and Java compare with Mobile Ajax?
• What is the difference between Ajax Platforms, Frameworks, Toolkits and Libraries?
• What existing Mobile Ajax frameworks, toolkits and libraries should I use?
• Can I use existing frameworks, libraries and toolkits?
• What is the relationship between Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets?
• Which browsers support Mobile Ajax?
• Which enterprise applications employ Mobile Ajax?
• What is the role of the Apple iPhone with respect to Mobile Ajax?
• How do applications like mojax or bling software fit in?
• How can you develop for and test on all those browsers?
• What are the (current) hurdles in implementing and running Mobile Ajax applications?
• What is AHAH / AJAH?
• Is there any standardization initiative for Ajax?

Make sure you buy a copy of issue 164 and check out pages 106/107.

Mobile

XTech’s moto this year was “The ubiquitous web” – naturally almost all presentations I attended dealt with ubiquitousity in some ways. To cut it short, for me there were two major topics: widgets and mobile. It felt like everybody was doing something with either widgets or in the mobile space, but this might partially be related to my choice of talks.

Compared to XTech 2006 with 3 talks specifically about mobile topics, XTech 2007 featured 5 talks in the mobile space. From the questions in the audience, especially in widget-related sessions the interest in mobile applications in general is growing too. The conference was divided into 4 tracks and I guess other tracks were less widget/mobile oriented then the ones I attended.

The talks of Ralph from Jaiku and Guido from Nokia were very interesting. Guido even managed to do a live demo of his Application – something many other were not able to do.

I also had extensive discussions with many people from Opera, met Hakon and some others again, Arve for the first time. Opera Mobile 9 should come out in a couple of weeks, 2 months at most I would say (Opera’s policy on this: it comes out when it’s done). The new browser will have support for widgets, but due to security issues will not provide access to many device capabilities yet (although it’s possible).

Widgets

The “major players” at the conference in my view were 3 companies/organizations: W3C, Opera and Joost. The first day’s birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions were a prime example for that, at least the ones about geolocation and widgets. The BOF session about widgets sounded a bit pessimistic. Problems over problems and different issues, partly solvable, partly very hard to come by were discussed. But that’s probably what a developer conference is about: discussions about how to deal with problems when implementing something new. Charles from Opera and Robin from Joost MC’d the session. These were the main points/problems covered:

• security (in general and especially when widgets get access to applications and hardware)
• privacy (how much can a user influence to which extend a widget can get access to the user’s data)
• interoperability (widgets talking to each other)
• portability/interoperability (widgets working in different widget engines)
• standardizations (how are widgets implemented)
• mobile vs. desktop widgets

An interesting (although obvious) though about the last point is:
Even if widget engines use the same implementation for widgets (i.e. XHTML/CSS/JS) on both the desktop and the mobile, there is still an issue of screen size (your desktop weather widget might not fit on your mobile screen) – that’s where the media attribute/different media types for CSS files come in handy. The mobile widget engine should therefore always prefer the CSS files with a “mobile” media attribute – this way, a widget could use the same code, but 2 different presentations and therefore become interoperable and usable in desktop and mobile engines.

Standards

Another big topic is standardization – of widgets, of device APIs that widgets can access, of geolocation information, of Ajax in general – there’s a lot to do in this area. One interesting project is Ryan’s http://www.locationaware.org, a project aimed at standardizing the way a web application can get access to the user’s location information.

My Presentation

My presentation went pretty well, Hakon introduced me to the audience and there I was presenting my 1st very own presentation at a conference. I made one mistake however: answering questions in between sections of my talk. This costs loads of time and can be quite disrupting, especially if people oppose your basic naming conventions:

There were some people in the audience that were not happy with the term “Mobile Ajax” because it hints towards “Mobile Ajax” being something else as “Desktop Ajax”. I tried to clarify this and my basic opinion on this is: technically it’s of course nothing else, but in the mobile space you have a different environment (browsers/run-times/java apps) and you have to deal with different problems.

Therefore I still think the term “Mobile Ajax” is a valid description of what we are looking at. Currently I also feel that a general approach to implementing Ajax accross devices and desktop cannot succeed and that currently you will have to do specific research in the mobile space, especially when it comes to Ajax and related technologies. That’s what I wanted to present at XTech and from people talking to me after the session and from the questions raised during the Q&A session this appears to be a good approach.

Here’s my slides from the presentation.

My presentation will be about “AJAX on mobile devices – making mobile web apps ubiquitous“.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

After an hour of networking and before Felix Haas of amiando could begin with his presentation we started going around the room introducing ourselves one after the other by giving ourselves 3 tags each. The audience was pretty mixed: software & web developers, startup entrpreneurs, marketing executives and also people from well-known companies such as the Boston Consulting Group, Süddeutsche Zeitung or Autoscout24.de – even a doctor joined this Webmontag :)
After his introduction Felix got a chance to start with his presentation about amiando, a web service to invite people and send out customized invitations to your events. Talking about founding and funding the company as well as developing the platform amiando, he gave us some interesting insights and good advice.

Then Florian Steger of Kupferwerk talked about Micro communities and how brands, media companies and organisations can enhance their customer life-cycle through online communities. It was also a very interesting presentation with quite interesting marketing insights on top.

The last presentation was held by me about Mobile AJAX. There were a lot of questions about the mobile web in general and the use of AJAX on mobile devices. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so Martin had to postpone his presentation to next Webmontag.

After the three presentations I got another chance to network. Although it was planned to change the location and go to a pub, amiando offered us their office and even provided us with some free beer – very cool!

The event started at 7:00 pm and the last people left after 12 midnight.
All in all it was a great evening, very social and a great opportunity to meet new and interesting people, to discuss business or technical related topics and to talk to start-ups and entrepreneurs like Johannes from kesto.org (web based password manager). Even if you look for a job in the IT business, it is a great opportunity to meet your new employer. Right now every company that presented is looking for new employees. So get in touch! Also refer to some pics of the evening.

I also brought up the idea of doing a PechaKucha (20 slides with 20 seconds each) session next time – just like what we have done at last years XML conference in Boston. It was a real blast there and maybe a perfect way to do presentations (or at least part of them) at such an evening, because of the limited time reserved for presentations. So I am encouraging everybody interested to respond!

I am really looking forward meeting more interesting people at the next Webmontag.