Tutorial T13-A - Developing Mobile Web Applications and Mobile Widgets

Alison Lee, Nokia Research Center – Palo Alto

Andreas Girgensohn, FX Palo Alto Laboratory

Abstract

With the wider availability of standards-based Web browsers on mobile devices such as smart phones like S60 and iPhone, designers, researchers and developers have the option of using the Web technologies and tools to quickly create mobile applications and deploy them to a variety of devices for evaluation and availability. This tutorial will explore and examine the use of mobile AJAX, Web services APIs, Web Runtime, and PyS60 Personal Http Server to create mobile Web applications and mobile widgets. These mobile applications and widgets can mashup data and functionality accessed over the Internet and/or from the mobile device using the same Web programming model that is common place on desktop browsers today.

This tutorial will focus on creating new or mobile versions of Web mashups exclusively for mobile devices. We will highlight differences due to mobility, mobile user experiences, device form factor, new and constrained device features, AJAX on browsers with limitation and data plan pricing considerations. We will discuss how to leverage mobile widgets and mobile Web applications in combination to enhance utility, performance, software maintenance, and needs and experiences of users on the go.

In a full-day version, we will have several time slots for hands-on experience with developing mobile mashups of Internet resources, phone resources as mobile Web applications and mobile widgets. In the half-day version, hands-on experience will be much limited and may be limited to walkthroughs of code fragments. For hands-on experience involving work with mobile devices, the attendees will be able to share the use of mobile devices provided by the instructors for the tutorial.

Presenter

Alison Lee, PhD, Principal Member of Research Staff. Alison has been exploring and developing applications and services to support human-computer interaction and social computing. At Nokia Research, she has shifted her focus of these issues for the mobile web domain. She is a principal in the development of a new mobile service called EasyMeet, introduced at Nokia World 2009 and being presented at CES’2009, that enables enterprise workers to conduct meetings (voice and data sharing) from their mobile phones.

From 2005-2007, she worked as a UI engineer at Metaweb Technologies developing the AJAX-based UI functionality for the launch version of www.freebase.com. At IBM Research and NYNEX Science & Technology, she explored new paradigms for collaboration in the realm of e-commerce, new technologies and applications to foster online social groups, Web-based tools for multi-modal interactions, accessibility, and Web services. Alison has published papers, participated in workshops, and presented papers related to her user interface research at numerous conferences, including CHI, CSCW, DIS, Group, Hypertext, Interact, and WWW. She has been involved in these conferences as papers committee member, reviewer, and chair of tutorials and workshops.

Andreas Girgensohn, PhD, Principal Scientist. He has been involved in projects concerned with the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of applications for monitoring, accessing, tagging, and editing video and for organizing and presenting digital photos and other digital documents. Andreas' research combines his interests in creating tools to support developers and end users, designing user interfaces, and improving communication and collaboration among people using multiple media and the Web. In 2008, ACM named him a Distinguished Scientist in recognition of his accomplishments. He previously worked at NYNEX Science & Technology on task-oriented user interface design and development, on support for