Mobile Ajax:Opera Platform SDK

Arve Bersvendsen has been working away in silence for the last few months at Opera. His team has been working on Opera Platform:

Opera Software released a beta version of Opera Platform SDK, a software development kit for developing and running Web applications on mobile phones. With Opera Platform SDK, developers can rapidly develop Web applications that let users interact with information in new ways. For example, a Web application can be an email client, a game, or a stock ticker.

What is Opera Platform

The Opera Platform SDK is best described as three different parts.

The Opera Platform Application Player. This is a special version of Opera that runs in full-screen without any user chrome.

The Opera Platform Application player acts as a host for the Opera Platform Application Framework, an advanced JavaScript-based framework for writing client-side web applications. This framework is itself written in JavaScript, and provides:

• An application grid, similar to what you find on the phone, used for navigating between applications.
• A theming service, so end-users can choose pleasing appearance for all of their applications.
• Menus and dialogs that fit in with the theme.
• A messaging system for letting applications interact with each other.
• A permanent storage, so applications can store data.

Finally, we have Opera Platform Web Applications: These are advanced web applications installed locally on the phone. Extended functionality in the Application Player enables these applications to interact with the native functionality on the phone, such as the address book, calendar or messaging interfaces. In addition to interacting with the native functionality, Opera Platform Web Applications can also interact with web services, using commonly known technology, such as XMLHttpRequest.

Google Mobile Ajax

There were a lot of posts about Google`s new mobile program, and various people were talking about it with respect to mobile Ajax.

Ironically, there is no Ajax to be seen. This is a nice J2ME application. It shows how many people see "Google + Maps == Ajax" :)

From other sources...

• Alasdair Allan has written about Building mobile Ajax with OS X
• ZDNet: Opera goes mobile with Ajax
• Infoweek: Opera Takes AJAX Mobile
• Geek Zone: Opera Enables Ajax on Mobile Browser