I attended an excellent session called Extending your IBM Portal Exceptional Web Experience to iPhone, Android, and Blackberry Devices at the excellent web experience conference. This presentation focused on delivering rich web site to specific mobile devices and some of the alternative approaches for accomplishing this with portal. The main focus was on using custom themes and virtual portals using the upcoming mobile portal themes. Below is a summary of some of the key messages and approaches.
Possible approaches to migrate a traditional web site to mobile
- Desktop site on mobile browser unchanged
- Native app
- Hybrid app
- Mobile Portal Accelerator
- Rich mobile web app
Leave desktop site as is and not adapted to a mobile browser
- This is a “do nothing” approach which lets a device browser handle the site as is
- Some capabilities will not translate well such as light boxes iframes, mouse overs on a touchscreen, fixed screen resolution, etc
Move to a Native Device App
- Most feature rich
- Can use device capabilities
- Most effort (write for each device)
- Does not address how your app can be discovered via a web search
Native app integration approaches with portal
- Full navigation talks to backend services without portal
- Full application communicating via portal REST services
Hybrid App
- Native app – deployable to app store but UI is just a web component (browser)
- Tooling allows enablement of this aproach
- PhoneGap and other libraries provide javascript capabilities
Mobile Portal Accelerator
- Device independent development
- Author themes, portlets, and content in XDIME/DIAL2
- Supports virtually all devices
- Best if you need to support a wide variety of devices
Rich Mobile Web Application
- Taylored to specific devices
Key Ways Portal Supports Rich Mobile Web Applications
Device Identification Approaches Inside Portal
- User agent detecdtion in header
- CCPP profile (java)
- Personalization rule
- Portal’s clients/markup support
Approaches to separate pages and content inside portal
- Use virtual portals to deliver content to specific devices
- Use full site for everything and adapt in code (least desirable)
IBM Portal Mobile Theme
- Coming 3rd quarter
- Lightweight, visually rich using Webkit CSS3 visual effects
- Mobile navigation widgets – set of showcase samples of common navigation patterns
- Carousels, lists, etc
- Mobile page layouts – set of showcase samples of content interaction patterns
- Intended to be extended and customized
- Will be very lightweight
Much of the rest of the presentation focused on more specific capabilities and how items like gestures, events, multi-touch, etc are handled in HTML5 and CSS and screen shots of some of the widgets were shown. The widgets appear to be very compelling and will serve as a good starting point for quickly delivering rich and custom branded mobile experiences. They definitely beat writing everything from scratch.
