Recently Packt Publishing has published a new book on Mobile Web Development written by Nirav Mehta. The book talks about MyMobileWeb as one of the open source tools that can be used in the development of sites that adapt to its Delivery Context.

Packt Publishing kindly sent me a copy of the book and here is the result of my review:

The book is very well written specially for beginners to Mobile Web Development. However, the experienced mobile web developer will also find very useful chapters on SMS, MMS sending and Paypal. The IVR chapter it is also a value added. The book covers all the fundamental useful tools needed to develop mobile web sites and applications. It is important to remark the excellent approach showing the limitations of LCD development and introducing the necessity of content adaptation. Also the example chosen is simple but at the same time enlightening. The author has demonstrated that he has done an excellent research on open source tools and standards for mobile web development. The chapter on Mobile AJAX has been also a very good choice, as Mobile AJAX is the future.

The only disadvantage I see is that Java development is not covered. Also an specific chapter on MyMobileWeb, including programming examples, could have been very positive

In a few words, if you are a serious mobile web developer that needs to have a good understanding of the tools and possibilities of this technology, you should definitely buy the book

The MyMobileWeb team is pleased to announce the availability of an early implementation of W3C’s DDR Simple API specification, which has been published yesterday as a Last Call Working Draft. This API is described as “Simple” in anticipation of a future more advanced API which will have a much wider scope.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-DDR-Simple-API-20080404/

From the Abstract:

“Web content delivered to mobile devices usually benefits from being tailored to take into account a range of factors such as screen size, markup language support and image format support. Such information is stored in “Device Description Repositories” (DDRs).This document describes a simple API for access to DDRs, in order to ease and promote the development of Web content that adapts to its Delivery Context.”

Our implementation is based on WURFL and UAProf data and supports the W3C’s Core Vocabulary and the MyMobileWeb’s vocabulary (the vocabulary used by MyMobileWeb to adapt content and applications). It is flexible enough to incorporate other data sources if available.

The implementation can be downloaded at

http://forge.morfeo-project.org/frs/download.php/314/DevInfo-Simple0.9.1.tar.gz

We are now working on integrating MyMobileWeb with the API implementation. We anticipate that our product will be one of the first open source adaptation tools that will use this new API.

Comments on the implementation are welcome. Please send comments to ddr-ri-develop@lists.morfeo-project.org

MyMobileWeb will be presented in the Brasil Campus Party, which is taking place in Sao Paulo from 11th to 17th of February, 2008. Further information here

We have been evaluating Mobile JSF an open source product intended to the development of mobile web applications, which has been recently released by Ericsson. The main conclusion is that it is a couple of light years behind MyMobileWeb. The most important limitations of Mobile JSF with respect to MyMobileWeb are:

• Mobile JSF’s device database contains only a minimal set of devices with a minimal set of properties. This fact has led us to the conclusion that Mobile JSF is not doing any kind of advanced content adaptation. They only send the correct markup to each device, but as we know, that is not enough. Remember that MyMobileWeb uses a bunch of properties to adapt to devices, the majority of them coming from WURFL.
• CSS Media Queries selection mechanisms are not as flexible as the style overriding mechanisms provided by MyMobileWeb. For instance, in MyMobileWeb, using style overriding, one can, very easily, to set up different layouts for different devices.
• Content selection based on CSS Media Queries is not efficient nor feasible in terms of bandwidth consumption. MyMobileWeb selects content at the server side which is far more efficient
• Automatic Pagination functionalities are not present in Mobile JSF
• Automatic Validations based on script on the client side are not supported by Mobile JSF
• The set of user interface components is very poor compared to MyMobileWeb’s

Conclusion: Mobile JSF is not an alternative to MyMobileWeb.