Website development for mobile devices

Author : Gardner L., Grigsby D.
Translation of the book : Vadim Chernik
Release date : March / April 2013

We are glad to make you happy: in the spring we have a new translation book by O'Reilly's Head First Mobile Web. Probably almost any IT person read something from the Head First series. If you have never read Head First, then in this post you can learn about the unique, fun design of this series.
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I was looking for a new book on mobile web development, and suddenly the work “Mobile Web” from the “Head First” series, written by Lisa Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby, came to my hand. After reading the book, I was literally amazed at how wide the subject is considered in it. Without exaggeration, the reader can get acquainted with almost any aspects of mobile web development.

Personally, I took up reading the book primarily because I was interested in the topic of responsive web design. But it was very interesting for me to get acquainted with mobile web frameworks, in particular with jQuery Mobile, with device discovery issues, data storage on a local device, using PhoneGap and many other topics.



Responsive web design gives me mixed feelings. I understand the potential of this concept, but the developer in me is indignant when I try to create pages based only on media queries. Of course, it would be great to leave the server side alone and change the view depending on the size of the user’s browser, but who can guarantee that this practice will be effective? In my opinion, responsive web design is great for content-rich or purely informational sites, but for web applications this method has not yet matured. It prevents me from creating components on the server side or performing a database query only so that the presentation layer rejects it - due to the adaptive design - I am a developer! Performance, processing speed, memory - that's what matters to me.



Another strong impression that the book has had on me is that adaptive design can be good in theory, but its practical implementation on a variety of devices can be a hefty headache and only work with constant tricks. In general, when working with CSS, it did not leave me feeling that this is not a programming language - but it would be worth it to be a programming language. Adaptive web design does not relieve you of the need for browser checks, etc. Anyone who has been working with JavaScript for a long time remembers what it is to write browser-specific code and what a nightmare is its simultaneous debugging in several browsers. Then jQuery appeared, and everything changed: nowadays such problems rarely arise. I'm still waiting for the framework to appear, which will also debug CSS in the same way and save us from browser quirks. Such a framework would significantly optimize and adaptive design.



Don't get me wrong - of course, responsive web design has been and remains a great concept. Simply, I believe that it may eventually turn into a hybrid that consists of responsive design on the client and server detection on the machine interface.



The section on PhoneGap seemed to me very interesting. I think that as long as the mobile market continues to break up (especially if Windows 8 enters this market), there will be an increasingly common platform on which to develop applications for any device. The smallest companies can no longer afford to have independent teams for development for Android and iOS. PhoneGap helps to cope with this problem by allowing developers to use HTML 5 and a mobile framework, such as jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch in hybrid applications. Again, theoretically, it will be possible to create a website with responsive design on HTML 5 and wrap it in PhoneGap, turning it into a mobile application. This is an interesting idea, although I’m not so inspired by the fact that web views are working on devices and not native user interface components. When web views work faster, using them may not be a problem. Other similar technologies, such as Appcelerator Titanium, allow developers to create cross-platform applications using JavaScript and native user interface components. That is the need for such tools, of course, there is.

“Website Development for Mobile” is a book for you if you are interested in an extensive introduction to mobile web design and development. The book highlights many interesting points, it gives the reader rich food for thought. In addition, it seems to me that the authors of the book perfectly help the persistent reader to master the best development practices, and also consider in detail many of the topics covered.

"Website development for mobile devices" will be soon in all stores in your city!