Mobile phonebook mash-up application developed using Web technologies

Short Description
This document discusses how to develop user interfaces of mobile devices using Web technologies. The user interfaces provide integrated access to on-device functionality and to Web-based services. The main benefits of this development approach are familiarity of comparably many developers with AJAX –style Web development, re-use of a proven and powerful browser engine, and ease of creating mash-ups. Based on our experience from prototyping a Phonebook Mash-up on top of the S60 WebKit browser engine the main remaining work items are an AJAX framework, which allow creating Web user interfaces with a mobile friendly user interface and interaction style, a usable security solution for JavaScript access to local resources, and JavaScript performance improvements.

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Content
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The starting hypothesis of this work has been that Web technologies are probably the best available solution for our
development challenges. We assumed the main benefits of using Web technologies are the following:
- First, familiarity to developers and tools support for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are better than any other user interface technology. By using Web technologies mobile user interface development can benefit from the increasing popularity of AJAX-style Web development.
- Second, screen layouts defined in CSS can be nicely scalable. As mentioned, scalability is important whenever the user interface layout needs to adjust to a multitude of different form factors found across mobile device models.
- Third, when compared to C++ UI programming, Web user interfaces promise to be much more portable, though a multitude of incompatibilities between browser engines exist.
- Fourth, providing the user interface in a multitude of local languages is essential for mobile device applications. Web technologies benefit from good and proven internationalization.
- Finally, the opportunity to implement Web user interfaces on top of an existing, proven browser, which need to be available on mobile devices anyhow for other uses such as a Web browser, instead of having to develop a new and dedicated rendering engine.
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