torsdag 5 april 2012

Yahoo! Cocktails lets mix your own mobile mash-up!


Several years ago, when we started the Mobile 2.0 project at the Mobile Life Centre in Sweden, I identified the web as the mobile platform of the future. This was before the HTML5 standard had started to become formulated - in fact, it was even before the iPhone and app craze that we are currently seeing! At that stage, mobile development was a total mess, with hundreds of competing phones and no unified channel for users to get access to mobile services. I argued that in the future, emerging web mobile standards will allow you to pull in hardware and sensing features like location, accelerometer and camera, and mix it up with online resources like authentication, maps and media. I called this the age of the mobile mash-up.

Today, many people agree with me that a large portion of mobile applications will in fact be web-based. But HTML5 alone, as impressive as it is, will not be enough to build interactive, cross-platform web apps. That is why Yahoo! has developed the Cocktails suite - a mix of technologies including HTTP, HTML5, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript - that will allow developers to build cross-plattform web apps very quickly. Read the introduction by project leader Bruno Fernandez Ruin' to get an overview of the project, and delve into the Yahoo! Developer Network to find out how it can work for you (and check out other cool Yahoo! tools such as YUI at the same time!)

Various components of Cocktails will be released open source over a period of time, and the first one out the door is Mojito, released this week. This application framework allows developers to write client and server components in the same language (JavaScript), using the same framework. Even more interesting, Mojito applications can run both on the client (in the browser) and on the server (with Node.js). This means that Mojito-based applications can start running on one side (e.g. the server where the service resides) and migrate over to the other (e.g. the browser on the device you are using to access it) depending on the best combination of bandwidth and hardware capabilities. The result is a smoother and more responsive web experience from the get-go, which is already featured in Yahoo! applications such as Livestand.

In Grounded Innovation, the final chapter points to a future where new interactive services are released quick and easy and iterated fast on the mobile web, in a way that the current OS and app-centric world does not allow. It will also become possible to make personalized web services for a small number of users - what I call hyper-customization. As more and more platforms like Cocktails become available, and as the current app-centric mobile development community migrates to the web, I am confident we will see of these mobile mash-ups making a large impact on the world.

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