■ IntroduCtIon
xxii
unable to upgrade, everything other than parts of Chapter 6 (“Display Modes, View Engines and Html Helpers”) and
Chapter 12 is still relevant. So whatever version of ASP.NET MVC you are using, this material will help you.
It is also very handy to have a wide range of mobile devices to test with. If you do not have all the mobile devices
that you need, you can also use simulators or emulators. If those are not available, you can use services like Device
Anywhere (http://www.keynotedeviceanywhere.com/) to test. ough you do have various options, I have found that
it’s much easier to test things if you have a device to use.
Why Mobile Web Development Is Awesome
ere are a number of good reasons to choose the mobile Web as a development platform. First, with mobile
web development, you only need one development tool set as I mentioned before. You do not need to learn Java,
Objective-C, and C# to build for each major phone.
Second, this also means that you can target multiple types of devices with one codebase. is a major boost
for both productivity and maintenance. Because of browser incompatibilities, it is not “write once, run anywhere.”
at would be fantastic. But a lot (or perhaps even most) of the code can be shared across browsers in modern
smartphones.
ird, if you already have experience in web development generally, you are already on your way to working
on the mobile web. Everything you learned in doing web development applies to mobile. All you need to do to be
eective in mobile development is to pick up some additional skills.
Fourth, you can deploy anytime. is is actually a very big deal. Find a critical bug in a mobile website? Push a
quick x out to the server farm. Find a critical bug in a native application? Go through the relevant app store and their
(sometimes) nicky process to get your change pushed out.
Fifth, no one can keep you o of their platform. For many, this may not even come up as a concern but it can be
a very big deal. Anyone’s application can be removed from any app store (though Apple is most notorious for this)
and there is nothing you can do about it. Having a mobile website along with native applications gives you a backup
strategy if a store decides to remove your application. By targeting the mobile web, you are not held captive by those
who run the app stores. e only one holding you back is you.
Where Mobile Web Development Has Its Challenges
So what is not to like about mobile web development? In reality, there are several advantages to doing native mobile
application development. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
First, if you ever found yourself complaining about desktop browser fragmentation, you haven’t seen anything
yet. On the desktop, you primarily have Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox and their various versions. Since the
latter two automatically update, you really only have to deal with one version of both Chrome and Firefox and a few
of Internet Explorer. e mobile browser landscape is far more fragmented. Users of iOS tend to upgrade quickly,
which pushes the newer, more interesting browser versions of mobile Safari more quickly. Android users are the exact
opposite. ey rarely upgrade and old browsers stay around for much longer. Additionally, manufacturers tweak their
Android implementations and their default browsers, so you will get (seemily endless) inconsistencies at times. Along
with that you also have two versions of the Windows Phone 7.x browser out as well as mobile Firefox and Opera. At the
moment you may not want to forget Blackberry as it is still hanging on to some market share, which gives you another
few variants of a webkit-based browser like you have on iOS and Android (though trac from Blackberry devices is on
a serious decline). And we have the recent addition of Firefox OS, though the numbers remain small for now. And that
is just the browser landscape for smartphones. Fragmentation only gets worse if you start supporting older devices.
Second, native applications get more capabilities than mobile web counterparts. Native applications can register
a phone for push notications, even while the app is not running. You cannot do this with mobile websites. You can’t
currently upload a photo directly from a phone to a site through the browser except in iOS 6+ and Android 4+. Native
applications with their native rendering also benet from improved performance. But the good news is that as time
goes on the browsers improve and get more functionality than they had before. ey also become faster. But it is likely
that mobile web applications will continue to trail native applications in terms of capabilities.
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