SmartGWT Mobile development experience thread

[Sytematic]

Hello people,

I open this thread, because I am going to develop a system with a major mobile component.

First of all, this url seems to contain some useful info, for anyone trying to do the same.
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/...velopment.html

(let's gather more links in this post that might be useful)

Theoretically, according to Isomorphic, you don't need to worry about a thing, as a programmer, except making sure you set the viewport correctly, as explained on the link above.

In the link above, Isomorphic says:

However the limited screen size often makes building a custom application specifically for mobile users a good idea.

I agree here, using a listgrid generally won't do it on a small screen.


Then there's performance.

My experience is that if you use some tabset with a listgrid in it, things get pretty slow, pretty quick. Not only as far as downloading is concerned, but mainly you'll notice that mobile browsers just aren't up to speed with interpreting the compiled javascript.

Therefore I would ask people here to share experiences and share info what YOU did to tackle challenges like this.

A question from my side:
- Is it better to deploy the mobile version of your app separately, or use History tokens to distinguish between normal version and mobile version (ie. myapp.html/ is web version, myapp.html/#mobile is mobile version, handle this in onModuleLoad)
- Anyone made a miller column like widget? Or is the miller column widget of SmartGWT working well (as far as rendering goes, ie. not show all columns in one screen, but only show the 'active' one) on a mobile device?

Please comment on my question both from a programming/maintaining POV as well as performance POV. Any experiences are welcome, I'd love to hear!

Let's create a do's / don'ts list, I'll update this once we gather content.

Do's
- Use separate code base for mobile, unless you do simple (as far as rendering is concerned) things, for performance sakes.
- Use Page.updateViewport(...)

Don'ts
- Use ListGrids, because the screen just is too small. It seems to be a pretty heavy component also.

[Sytematic]

I was hoping on more responses :-)

[atomatom]

I had a good look at developing for mobile not long ago. My general conclusion was that I need to develop static non-JS HTML pages for mobile browsers *if* I wanted good phone coverage. I posted this here already, but it gives you a good idea of the headaches in developing for mobile http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/ - the slide deck has some stats on phone market share.

Now, if you are ok with only supporting decent modern smartphone browsers, then SmartGWT is could do it. I too would like to know what things work.

It would be useful if you gave some more details on your experiments.

[Sytematic]

I am looking for supporting the majority of browser. Was planning on SmartGWT, and then try to use as LITTLE markup as possible.

Because, as far as I can see at the moment, performance is the bottleneck.

I think I will create a basic menu structure in SmartGWT, to see what's what.

Was hoping someone already had done this :-)

[atomatom]

I look forward to hearing your experiences.

What are the general aims for your project?

I would argue it is not performance that is the bottleneck, rather the patchy support of javascript on mobile phones. If you want to build for Android/iPhone, then I think you'll find it works ok.

The easy test is try out the showcase on your phone. :)

[Sytematic]

I am aiming for an app-like experience, so the layout should fill the screen.
Lots of buttons, no forms. So no need for grids probably, might need some custom widgets.

The app will have some location-aware behaviour, so i think i need JSNI and connect to the mobile google maps web api.

Still contemplating though, if I shouldn't use like a light-weight php solution that connects to my backend using an api.

Not really feel like going back to php... really want smartGWT to work basically :)

[atomatom]

You might want to check out the gwt-mobile projects. There is also a phonegap wrapper for GWT, allowing access to phone geo info.

[Sytematic]

Hmmmm, but I 'd love to use the .ds.xml paradigm. I hate writing DTO's, and RPC code :-)

So want to stay as close to SmartGWT as possible, it must be somehow possible.

Is the Mobile theme the same as Simplicity by the way?

[Stongkin]

Should SmartGWT Mobile applications work with Windows Phone -devices? Even Showcase shows only blank screen...