Pathfinder Development » Mobile Ajax and Predictions of J2ME’s Demise

Mobile Ajax and Predictions of J2ME’s Demise

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, August 10, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Nokia is taking a hard look at Ajax for mobile platforms, according to this article. The money quote from a Nokia exec:

Epting , Nokia's Vice President for Developer Operations, says that Nokia's aim of making the mobile platform more predictable and easier to work needs naturally to include newer browsing platforms...and AJAX is very much flavor of the month, so Nokia needs to watch it carefully and decide what mobile developers want.

And from Ajit Jaokar we get the following prediction.

"Java ME as it stands today is seriously flawed (not the technology but the business model)," Jaokar comments. He adds:

XHTML will be an 'also ran' because AJAX will offer a superior user experience. Hence, my belief that AJAX will be the preferred platform of choice for mobile applications at the expense of Java ME and XHTML."

I thought XHTML was part of the Ajax picture, but as we know from his previous articles on the subject, Ajit means 'webapps with postbacks' when he says 'XHTML.' Part of his reasoning is that both XHTML and J2ME break several of the Web 2.0 'principles' set forth by Tim O'Reilly. I think we can agree that XHTML apps that use Ajax are better than ones that don't for bandwidth constrained mobile devices. They also fulfill principle #7 -- Rich User Experiences. J2ME, on the other hand, fails the test of principle #4 -- End of the Software Release Cycle.

There's a few principles that I think mobile Ajax applications need to adhere to in order to make mobile Ajax compare favorably with J2ME:

Provide equivalent functionality while downloading smaller amounts of Javascript and other data to limited bandwidth and memory devices.
Provide some functionality even with limited connectivity.
Elegantly support a diverse set of hardware interfaces.
Prevent business logic and sensitive data from leaking into the business tier.

I'm confident this is all possible in the long run as mobile devices get better bandwidth and start to look more like little laptops. What I'm not confident about is the timeframe. Too early is the same thing as wrong, and Ajax for mobile may be too early.

Right now there's lots of positioning with regard to Ajax and mobile, but not a lot of action -- the press release phase of technology innovation. It is worth noting that for the mobile version of its innovative Ajax maps application, Google didn't go with Ajax but instead deployed a J2ME app.

Technorati : ajax, j2me, mobile

Topics: Mobile

agile ajax

Comments: 5 so far

Well, mobile ajax can be relevant perhaps even significant technology one day, but it has long way to go to replace J2ME. Mobile devices can’t rely on availability of relieable network connection and this is vital for Ajax to work. There are (quite common) use cases where reliabilty of the network connection won’t be solved even with improvements in GPRS/UMTS/whatever technologies. What about users abroad, with all those interconnection problems and ridiculously high roaming rates for data ? J2ME don’t rely on permanent connection and thus will work even in scenarios such as flight mode etc. IMO 90% of the mobile applications usage now is without any network connection an in such conditions J2ME thrive and will further improve with forthcoming MIDP3 release.

Comment by Pavel, Thursday, August 10, 2006 @ 4:01 pm
Surely the two are orthogonal? As the earlier comment makes clear, J2ME apps work without the network needed, and Ajax is dependent on it.

And the flaws in the J2ME business model are even more apparent in the AJAX model. IE: you have closed garden vendors who try to control what goes into their network, and demand your first born as payment for data traffic. Neither are going to fly until the business models are truly fixed. I’m not holding my breath…

Further, are all phone vendors going to render AJAX identically? At least with J2ME there is a high degree of cross platform support. It isn’t ideal, but it is better than having to create different scripts for different browsers.

Comment by Martin Paulo, Thursday, August 10, 2006 @ 4:44 pm
Ajax is a good think to solve current HTML flaw, but it’s probably not the only solution for mobile (and could be even create worst result if badly used)

I think mobile might be the opportunity to solve the current flaws and difficulties of creating web based rich UI, and to create a better framework by using existing pieces together: html, j2me, vector graphics, JS/Ajax etc…
( http://blog.landspurg.net/web20back-to-the-roots )

Comment by Thomas Landspurg, Friday, August 18, 2006 @ 12:27 pm
Ajax will replace for sure the way mobile online apps are architecture for eliminating the unnecessary round trips to the server by providing some caching, queuing of requests, asynchronicity, client side binding etc. Ajax is already good in mitigating the uncertainties of the cellular network and providing a good user experience. But right now and certainly not in the next three years at least, we can not talk about replacing J2ME or .NET on the mobile devices. First because it’s not doing that in the desktop world and second lots of the applications run lot off business logic on the client side and need offline data for long disconnected periods. Flash Lite is an other technology that could take a big part of the pie in the near future because it (should) provide a neat user experience, push mode, same look and feel, offline capabilities, caching, etc.

Comment by Louenas Hamdi, Saturday, September 30, 2006 @ 11:57 pm
Ajax is still far from mobiles, thats because mobile http connection is still slow and limited. Beside browsers on mobile phones are very different, so it’s very hard to prepare something smooth for ajax mobile.

Comment by mobile marketing software, Tuesday, February 12, 2008 @ 4:57 pm