Mobile Web App Development With jQuery Mobile - Pros, Cons & Alternatives!
“We simply cannot ignore jQuery Mobile enough for enabling developers to build responsive themes and mobile-optimized websites. The JavaScript framework has simplified our lives for better and has unremittingly enhanced the complete functionality of mobile devices. And the fast learning curve further makes it easier to provide a user-friendly, smooth experience. However, mobile web app development with jQuery Mobile shares somewhat a different tale, for it features two different aspects for a developer to use. Listed below are some positive and negative facets that come along with jQuery Mobile framework, and the ones that can definitely help you with creating your mobile website. Take a look!” Pros:
jQuery Mobile is touch-optimized, easy to implement and features a minimalist philosophy. As an intuitive framework, it makes JavaScript development effortless for developers, and lets developers create a HTML5 mobile front-end that largely contributes to building a strong website. With its touch optimized engine, it ensures the resources being used efficiently and effectively. Devices with limited resources can also work flawlessly within the app environment built with jQuery Mobile making it the best choice for developing apps for the cross device purpose. The 21st century is highly influenced by new and different smart operating systems including earlier BlackBerry. Smart operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows and now FireFox are gaining rapid popularity in the industry. Consequently, it becomes a tough situation to handle all these platforms for any smart app developer for their app. Fortunately, jQuery Mobile takes great care of cross-platform, which basically helps resulting a clean and distinct code along with multi platform support. The framework takes cross-devices functionality into consideration - covering almost every mobile OS platform (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, and others), and ensuring that writing different codes for different devices or resolutions should not be a difficult factor to achieve. Developers can largely benefit from jQuery Mobile’s integrated ThemeRoller, a tool that helps build themes without having to write any line of code. It’s known as “swatch” and enables web app developer in building quick mobile themes for different purposes. It gives adequate room to the developer to customize different components of any theme like header, footer, color combination, background and etc. Building your own theme gets easier with this framework. It makes a lot sense in creating awesome and interactive themes without much effort and time. The most amazing feature of jQuery Mobile is its responsive property, i.e. it enables developers in building responsive web pages on the fly. Since its core component is HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, hence the responsive web page design becomes lot funnier than before. It embeds an amazing ability to tweak or modify the pages to different Android powered mobile devices - with different display resolutions and with different display sizes. Users can easily add collapsible menus using jQuery, and take utmost advantage of its layout grids. The latter actually plays a crucial role if you want to build a product page, result page, or any other custom page for your mobile-optimized version of a website. It not only makes the user feel delight while browsing the page but also makes the page load faster. In fact, jQuery Mobile encourages the mobile app developer to integrate AJAX for efficient use of resources. AJAX is the proven and most admired technology in creating Asynchronous and interactive web app on the fly. Cons: One noticeable drawback that often comes with jQuery is its functionality speed. Apps designed using jQuery framework feel considerably slower than native (even if you’re using the most recent versions of iOS or Android). However, the framework designers are pretty close to fixing this issue. The framework runs smoothly and efficiently for designs that are simple in nature, allowing users to use a default theme or build their own theme. However, jQuery does not come prepared for designs that demand more, and thus gets difficult to use when something more custom is needed. Also, the framework may result in creating issues with the CSS styles - particularly, if you use a basic theme and write your HTML page structure designs right from the beginning. At the same time, you may experience issues with the anchors, mainly because jQuery Mobile relies on Ajax to navigate through the pages. Finally, the animations developed in jQuery Mobile platform are simply miserable! In fact, the process of animation is having a lot of troubles, hence never received better response from the industry. Moreover, it creates even worst situation with mobile devices that run under many constraints starting from memory, hardware and other software constraints etc. Alternatives: Since jQuery is having a few issues that can severely affect the overall user experience of any smart app; hence industry has revealed many better options for the smart app developers. Let’s have a quick glance over those alternatives. ZeptoJS: It’s simply outstanding and having some tremendous features that start with its smaller size, i.e. just 8KB against 32KB of jQuery! Moreover, it makes the animation process not only easier but also effective and efficient along with all other features of jQuery Mobile platform. So, we can say it is the clear substitute of jQuery Mobile if you are considering Android and iOS as your primary landing device (which is around 95% of total ecosystem). App Framework and Sencha Touch: The biggest drawback of jQuery Mobile framework is its limited access for native app developer and hybrid developer. With App Framework, this issue gets resolved in a single shot. App framework is extremely reliable in developing Hybrid apps which is in highest demand in current scenario. It never makes your app look like a clone as in jQuery Mobile rather makes it look unique and provides much better look and feel and user experience than any other mobile app development platform. The last word There is absolutely no doubt that jQuery Mobile is a wonderful framework that helps developers with mobile web app development. It simply helps build mobile-optimized sites and eliminates the need for any app store approval. However, complex designs are not generally supported by this framework. If you keep this into consideration and still decide to get your hands on it, jQuery Mobile will not really leave you disappointed in any manner. Mindfire has deep experience in developing business applications, enterprise database applications and online/web applications. We will be glad to share our expertise in detail with you. To learn about our jQuery expertise and services please download our jQuery base form plug-in which will allow you to create custom looking radio buttons and check boxes in your HTML form. We have created several similar and advanced plugins for our clients.