The interwebs get more and more complicated for web developers every day. In the Smartphone world, optimizing for mobile is really a generic, unimpressive thing unless you resign to a single platform and decide everything else can suffer. Smartphones aren’t the only mobile concern anymore either, as tablets of all shapes, sizes and resolutions are well on their way, and that same mobile deployment simply won’t look good on that playground. Since HTML5 isn’t exactly mobile friendly yet, and it’s just plain expensive to do fully scalable Flash websites, there hasn’t really been an answer until now. Welcome to jQuery’s mobile framework, appropriately named jQueryMobile.
jQuery, for those unaware, is a JavaScript library that makes it extremely easy to implement advanced interactive elements onto any website. It simplifies how to traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add AJAX. Chances are, atleast one or two websites you go to in any given day is using jQuery in some form or fashion. It runs great on everything, and when coupled with a talented graphic artist, can create truly unique and interactive websites in comparably very little code. In case you haven’t noticed, i’m a big fan. So when jQuery decided to release a mobile framework, designed to bring their amazing desktop fun to the mobile space, I got very excited.
jQueryMobile is still in it’s Alpha stage, but can be played with at jQuerymobile.com, for those looking to try it out. My prediction is that mobile developers will see this as a great and easy way to make their mobile websites really stand out, and utilize this framework to take their impressive displays of technical genius to the mobile world, where most of us are looking at websites now anyways. Plus, it’s completely cross platform, so even if Android is not your primary market, you aren’t shafting anyone by using some no-name plugin. It’s a complete solution, and I look forward to seeing our mobile world start to look better and better.
