The Evolution
of Web
Development
for Mobile
Devices
Mobile device technologies have skyrocketed in the past 10 years, these technologies have created a much more efficient world that we live in today. Business are able to answer their customer emails right from their mobile devices, people are able to take pictures and share them across many social networks in almost any place in the world using their mobile device, there are many things a person can do when using a mobile device but one of the most important task is accessing web content. In order to do things like sending emails or accessing social media a mobile device must use the web. In this discussion we will focus on the web side of mobile devices.
The Latency Problem
Mobile devices have significantly improved over the years, but at the same time so has desktop computers and laptops, with the increased capabilities of desktop and laptops comes more detailed web resources such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), JavaScript, images, and video. Most websites are designed with a desktop platform with a wired connection, wired latency platforms are usually associated with home networks or business networks, basically it’s an internet connection that travels directly between points. Since wired latency travels directly between points there is much less latency because there is less to get in the way of the requested data. Overall latency is stable when using a wired connection. Wireless latency is much different from wired latency, wireless latency connects to the internet using 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, or Wi-Fi. Using a wireless connection to connect to the internet can have much more latency than a wired connection, this is because the data used in these type of connections are sent and received through the air. Open air causes resistance as well as providing an open space for other sources of interference, such as, buildings, walls, radios, microwaves, etc.
Improving Web Performance
One way to improve web performance is to reduce the amount of HTTP requests, concatenating external JavaScript and CSS files into one file could save a lot of time and space when accessing the web. If possible combining many files into a single file could create a much more fluent experience. Overtime concatenating has evolved from processing at build time to processing at runtime, concatenating process using runtime can be achieved by using a content delivery network (CDN). Google has created Apache module called mod_concat, this module makes it much easy to concatenate files dynamically at runtime. The mod_concat module works by using a special URL format to download multiple files using a single request.
An example of mod_concat:
Another great way to improve web performance is to eliminate images. Having many images on a single web page could increase load time and cause performance issues. There are many ways to reduce or eliminate images, CSS3 which is the latest version of CSS has provided many ways to eliminate images. Up until recently adding extras to an image like shadows, rounded corners, etc., took quite a bit of work and time to achieve, now all the extras can be done using a few lines of CSS. Improving web performance on mobile devices is especially important. One of the most common ways to improve web performance on mobile devices is to create a site with parameters for a mobile device and make the URL a mobile URL (m.URL.com).
Mobile Device Limitations
Like stated above most websites were created with desktop platforms, since latency isn’t really an issue for desktop websites, slow and expensive ways of creating a website was not really a concern. Web technologies have come a long way in the mobile device world, the growing demand of the mobile market has caused web technologies to adapt to the mobile platform and ultimately created a much more efficient way of accessing the web with mobile devices. With that there are still limitations with mobile devices that are taken into consideration, although mobile devices have become much more powerful in the recent years, battery consumption remains to be a problem. Mobile web platforms can be rich and full of animations but the cost of running those things could cause more power consumption, which is a problem for most people.
Conclusion
The article that was used for this summary was made in early 2013, since then there have been many innovations that have helped eliminate some of the problems that were address in the article. Wireless networks have increased significantly since early 2013, both speed and stability have started to match wired connections. Something the article does not discuss is bootstrapping. Bootstrapping makes the crossover from desktop web technologies to mobile web technologies very easy. Although battery consumption is still an issue we face in 2015, there are many ideas floating around that could help elevate the problem. Increasing the wireless range of the 4G LTE networks help battery consumption because the mobile device isn’t always searching for a signal. There are many other innovations that are being developed to help battery consumption. Overall the evolution of web development for mobile platforms have come a long way.
Reference:
Using mod_concat to Speed Up Start Render Times. (2008, August 1). Retrieved January 29, 2015, from http://www.artzstudio.com/2008/08/using-modconcat-to-speed-up-render-start/
Zakas, N. (2013). The evolution of web development for mobile devices. Communications of the ACM, 56 (4), 42-48. DOI:10.1145/2436256.2436269
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