Mobile Web Development

In Detail

As more users access the Web from their phones and other handhelds, web developers need to learn techniques for targeting these new devices. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google target mobiles with their services and products. Companies use mobile services to provide staff access to their applications while away from a computer.

This book is a complete, practical guide to writing mobile websites and applications. You will learn how to create mobile-friendly websites, adapt your content to the capabilities of different devices, save bandwidth with compression, and create server-side logic that integrates with a mobile front end. You will also see other methods for integrating your web application with mobile technology: sending and receiving MMS and SMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and working with voice calls to provide spoken interaction.

The book illustrates every technique with practical examples, showing how to use these development methods in the real world. Along the way we show how an example pizza delivery business can use these methods to open up to the mobile web.
Whether you want to provide customers and users of your public website with new ways to access your services, or build applications so that staff can stay up to date while on the road, this book will show you all you need to build a powerful mobile presence.

Technologies and tools covered in the book

PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP), Wireless CSS, WAP 2.0, Tera WURFL, MyMobileWeb, Mobile Web Toolkit, Image Server, GAIA Image Transcoder, HAWHAW , ready.mobi, Nokia's Mobile Internet Toolkit , SMIL, Voxeo's Prophecy server, VoiceXML (VXML), grXML, Frost library,  WALL, WURFL, SMS, MMS, mobile payment gateways, mobile widgets, Mobile AJAX, Android, Google Gears, and Dojo Offline.

Mobile Web Development shows you how to build a mobile presence for your web applications and sites. It covers targeting different mobile web browsers, sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and developing voice- and touchtone-response systems.

Approach

The author adopts a fast-paced, practical approach to developing for the mobile web. The book focuses on solutions, pragmatic tips, and fast results rather than theory.

Each chapter focuses on an aspect of taking a pizza delivery company onto the mobile web. This ensures that the chapters remain practical and realistic, focusing on getting things done. The book also provides discussion and reference material to help you apply the techniques to your own projects.

Who this book is for

This book is for web developers who want to provide mobile support for their applications.

The book assumes some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The reader should also know a server-side language. The examples in the book use PHP, but can be adapted easily to other languages. The book does not use J2ME, focusing instead on using the phone's web browser and other standard features.