Today, Google announced the release of Gears for Mobile Devices. This is good news as it empowers mobile developers to create mighty applications in a wise known from modern web applications. So, what does this mean and what is it good for?
The mobile world consists of cell phones, smart phones and PDAs/handhelds. Leaving aside the cell phones, one finds useable devices with and without a stylus, capable of getting an Internet connection on their own or via some bluetooth or wifi link. These devices are dominated by two major operating systems: i) Windows Mobile and ii) Symbian OS. There are also some Linux platforms out there (Maemo, OpenMoko, Android), but their market share is not yet relevant. Thus, it is straight forward to focus on the two established platforms in the first instance.
Developing applications for Windows Mobile is pretty easy; all you need is Visual Studio (not the Express Edition) and you can start with C++, C#/Visual Basic, JScript or ASP.NET. It is quite the same with Symbian OS, wich gives you C++, C#/Visual Basic, Java, Ruby, Python and Perl among others. However, creating cross platform applications gets a bit more complicated – and it is unlikely that you can port them to an emerging platform easily.
Tough, what both platforms have in common is a capable web browser. From the diversity of microbrowsers, one finds Internet Explorer, Opera Mobile, Web Kit- and Mozilla-based browsers to be the common ones. All those browsers support JavaScript, XMLHttpRequests, CSS and what else you need to create rich client applications.
What these browsers are lacking is permanent storage: when you loose your internet connection, you cannot save or load any data. This issues was solved for the fully featured desktop browsers recenty (see Adobe Air, Google Gears, or Microsoft Silverlight) and Gears is now available for mobile devices, too. According to the Google Code Blog, they currently support IE Mobile and plan the integration of other mobile browsers in the near future.
