Trends Report

jQuery Mobile: The App Internet, Without The App

Going Hands-On With jQuery Mobile Shows The Growing Power Of The Web

November 1st, 2011
Jeffrey Hammond, null
Jeffrey Hammond
With contributor:
Mike Gilpin

Summary

In the first installment of our new "hands-on" mobile series, we build and deploy a simple mobile application with jQuery Mobile. jQuery Mobile is easy to install and set up and allows developers to quickly begin developing mobile applications that run on multiple mobile phones and tablets. Our application ran well on multiple devices, including the Apple iPhone and iPad, RIM BlackBerry Torch, and Google Chromebook. But the jQuery Mobile framework, in late beta, is still a work in progress, with minor flaws with navigation bars. Sparse documentation also made it a challenge to customize default user interface (UI) settings to deliver the desired UI look and feel. That said, we largely accomplished our objective and deployed a cross-platform mobile app with no tooling or runtime costs. jQuery Mobile's combination of open source license, familiarity to web developers, and ease of deployment makes it a great option for building simple cross-platform web apps for glance-able information or aggregation of data from multiple sources.

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