Write a simple mobile application always connected.
<p>In this blog , I want to explain about Mobile applications. As you all know there are 2 kinds of Mobile applications, one a web version and second one as a client deployed in your mobile, it is similar to a PC.</p><p>Most of us think that Mobile applications are different to a PC application. In terms of data transfer, mobile application will have less bandwidth compared to PC where, PC can be connected to network using wifi or hight speed cable. As the network bandwidth of mobile is less, we can not send or receive more data and the speed depends on device’s hardware too.</p><p> </p><p>Also, we can build only small applications in Mobile due to size restriction of the user interface. But, as the iphone and android phones are in market now, the user interface got few other options to increase the size of the application.</p><p> </p><p>When we take a standalone application that is deployed in Mobile, we can use different technologies/SDKs/APIs like j2me, android, iphone SDK and more etc</p><p> </p><p>The applications build on the above technologies need not have wifi or gprs connection always. So these applications may be connected only when internet network is available. The disadvantage here is user can not do anything when he is in offline. This is pure online application – always connected. </p><p>Here I want to explain a simple application that does not use or require the above APIs or SDKs.</p><p>We can write an application using normal J2EE project includes JSP to build the user interface and can have web frameworks like struts, spring or any J2EE framework or SAP Portal’s Portal Application Project.</p><p>In addition to this, in JSP, instead of writing HTML tags, we have to write WML tags to display the data. WML is a language that is widely used across the globe for many mobile applications. It is similar to HTML with different WML based tags.</p><p>We need to define a XML language version and DOCTYPE declaration on top of the JSP page.</p><?xml version=”1.0″?><br /><!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN”<br />”http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml“><br /><br /> <br /><p>If we do not have any business logic, we can define static pages like html pages, that are called wml pages (extension .wml).</p><p>Like <HTML> tag, we will have <wml> tag for WML pages. we have to have a <card> tag to display our user interface.</p><p>A card can contain text, markup, links, input-fields, tasks, images and more.</p><p>There can be number of cards. </p><wml><br /><card id=”no1″ title=”Card 1”><br /><p>Hello World!</p><br /><p></card> </p><p> </wml> </p><p> Once we build the JSP or WML , deploy your web application as usual to call this JSP or WML file in mobile. From mobile’s browser we can open the application or jsp URL link of the page to see the contents. Also we can send email to the enduser and give the URL to open the page in the mobile, so user can access the page through his/her email. </p><p> </p><p>This is an always online method of a mobile application and the main advantage is we do not need to worry about any APIs like Google’s Android or iPhone SDK because this is always connected one and it will be launched in a browser and it will not be deployed in the user’s mobile. </p><p>Also, user does not require to download the application in his mobile and install.</p><p>In next few blogs, I can explain you about Webdynpro Mobile application (always online).</p><p> </p>