The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the OpenAjax Alliance jointly organized a Workshop on Mobile Ajax, which took place on 28 September 2007 at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View
Report
A full report on the workshop is available. The report was written by the Jon Ferraiolo and reviewed by Daniel Appelquist (the two co-chairs for the workshop). The following summary was adapted from the full report.
Among areas the workshop identified as needing attention are scripting access to device APIs, offline/disconnected operation, widgets, mashups and security.
Some of the position papers called for new standards efforts across a spectrum of topics. Implicit in these proposals is the general notion that if the industry can agree on key standards, then the industry would be unleashed to pursue major innovations due to cost efficiencies achieved due to unification of the delivery platform. The attendees listed many candidates for standards activities: local caching, smart caching, APIs to device capabilities, key mapping, security, mashups, microformats for PIM information, server push, DOM extensions for mobile, CSS extensions for mobile, and best practices.
For more details, read the full report.
Other documents
The following documents related to the workshop are also available:
- raw minutes
- scratchpad document used for note-taking during the workshop
- the complete list of position papers accepted
- archived copy of the original Call for Participation
Agenda
Instead of going for a traditional “paper presentation” approach, we used a “lightning talk” format, where selected presenters gave five-minute talks on topics from their papers, followed by moderated discussion.
8:30 Welcome and Introduction (30 minutes)
Presenters
- Dan - Welcome, introduce W3C/MWI, Vodafone's views
- Jon - Introduce OpenAjax Alliance, IBM's views
- Mike - W3C
9:00 "One Web" (60 minutes) - DKA to Chair
Presenters: AOL, Google, Paving Ways, DoCoMo
Discussion topics:
- What does "One Web" actually mean?
- Subset HTML, CSS, DOM, JS: yes or no
- Challenges
- Small screen, CPU, memory, latency, input devices, etc.
- How to address?
- Opportunities
- Always with you, phone, camera, location, identity, etc.
- How to address?
10:00 BREAK (10:00 - 10:30)
10:30 Access to Device Capabilities - Ajax integration with device APIs (60 minutes) - JF to Chair
Presenters: Sun, Aplix
Mention/summarize: SAP's paper.
Discussion topics:
- How important is the integration between Java/MSA and Ajax?
- What's the backup strategy for devices that don't support Java?
- Who should take the lead on security proposals?
11:30 Widgets, offline, and device-resident (60 minutes) - DKA to Chair
Presenters: Nokia, Google, ACCESS, Sprint
Discussion topics:
- How important are widgets?
- What's the uptake on W3C Widgets?
- How important is offline?
- Who should take the lead on offline proposals?
- How important is Ajax running local (device-resident apps)?
12:30 LUNCH (1 hr) - catered
13:30 Role of server-side adaptation (45 minutes) - JF to Chair
Presenters: Novarra, MobileAware, Volantis
Discussion topics:
- Which problems can server-side adaptation solve?
- What special challenges do Ajax techniques present?
- What new initiatives do we need?
14:15 What new standards efforts do we need? (90 minutes) - DKA to Chair
Presenters: Dojo, Wake3, Yahoo, SK Telecom, Ikivo
Discussion topics:
- Do we need minor incremental standards efforts or major new standards efforts?
- DOM? CSS? JavaScript? Caching? Softkeys? Communications? SVG (WICD)?
- Create new standards specific to Mobile Ajax or evangelize standards that already exist?
15:45 BREAK (30 minutes)
16:15 Education and evangelism (e.g., Ajax best practices) (60 minutes) - JF to Chair
Presenters: Dan (MWI) and Jon (OpenAjax), both of which work in this area
Discussion topics:
- Initiatives for Web developers?
- Initiatives for Ajax toolkit developers?
- Initiatives for browser vendors and device manufacturers?
- Initiatives for developer tools (e.g., IDEs)?
- Initiatives towards web service providers?
17:15 Wrap-up (30 minutes)
- Next steps
- Commitments to participate in further activities
- etc…