Two pretty big announcements in the “mobile RIA” space that don’t have much to do with each other, but show that the mobile side of the RIA fence is starting to get just as much attention as the desktop and browser sides. The first announcement is that Google Gears will be available on mobile devices. Google Gears is a plugin that allows web developers to store their web application data in a SQLite database so you can do things like take them offline. The mobile version is a bit more interesting. While some people say we’re never really offline with the web, how often have you lost cell phone coverage? Now when you’re using web applications on your phone, the Google gears plugin can store your work for you. Larry Dignan questions the idea of offline access being a game changer, and I agree to the extent that until we work out the synching problems, it isn’t. I didn’t see anything in the Gears announcement that talked about that.
The second big mobile announcement is that Silverlight will be running on some Nokia devices. This is really big news as it’s going to help applications in the mobile space get more complex. One of the big values I see in adoption of rich Internet applications is that you can create the “continuum of experience”. What I mean by that is that you can take the same code and same general UI implementations to create something very easily across a number of mediums and devices. Flash has had some of this with Flash Player, now AIR, and then FlashLite, but the FlashLite implementation has always lagged a bit behind the Flash Player version. We want to get those up to parity but the processing power on devices has limited that a bit. I’m really curious to see if this is full Silverlight on these devices or if it’s a subset. Exciting times in RIA-land!
