Barely scratching the surface

Some days ago, TomSoft wrote an article discussing a few myths of the 'mobile Ajax'. I think many (including myself) share Thomas' view that it's important not to hype technologies, and that its important not to draw conclusions like 'the mobile web 2.0 equals mobile AJAX' (meaning that AJAX is something running in the browser). The Web 2.0 is a much broader term, and limit it to a single set of technologies does not make sense. He is also correct when stating the there are alternatives currently deployed on lots of mobile phones and that mobile AJAX is not a way to bypass the operators. In fact most of the interest in the world for Mobile AJAX solutions derives from Operators who are interested in superior user experiences across devices and medias.

What I question is the following:

Looks good, but unfortunately, I have no Ajax enabled browser out of the thousands of handsets we have here at MobileScope….

How you manage to have thousands of phones without an AJAX capable browser? Opera Mobile is estimated to ship on approximately 46 different handset model in 2006 and Nokia ships their new web browser on a significant model. This means that there are already millions of AJAX enabled mobile phone in the market.

Seems that the Write Once Run Anywhere myth is back!! It was actually already not achievable through technology designed for this, so I did not see how Ajax app (which is basically designed for one or two platform) will be able to address suddenly thousands of different platforms…..

I haven't heard anyone claim this anywhere. But we are in Opera reusing lots and lots of AJAX solutions on other devices than it was originally designed for. Whether SoonR in their demo reused any code from their PC version is not sufficient to argue otherwise.

As for Li Mikas comment in his blog:

So finally... OPERA mobile AJAX platform got themselves a partner... SOONR.com to develop a mobile ajax app running on their OPERA platform

This has nothing to do with Opera Platform. It's a standard AJAX application, that just happens to be running on a mobile phone rather than a PC. Opera Platform on the other hand is a full AJAX framework for creating user interfaces and applications with.

Summing up. The discussion points Thomas brings forward are very valid, but there is a clear difference between advocating for which technologies will succeed in the future and which ones are available today.

Opera today announced that the next version of Opera for devices (which is used for TVs, set-top boxes, portable media players or even game consoles) will have support for Web Widgets. Opera already added support for Widgets in the Beta version of Opera 9 for PCs, and enabling support for this on embedded devices means that you might very soon be able to use your favorite widgets on your next TV or media player.

This is very cool!

Widgets are small web pages that resides outside the user interface of the web browser and are typically front-ends to online web sites. Some of my current favorite Widgets includes a football world-cup widget and off course the Slashdot news reader.

I never expected to develop an application for a TV, but this might just change that