Beginners’ guide to Mobile App development with Nokia WRT – Introduction
How it all began
I would like to start with few facts about myself:
- I have never developed an application for mobile phones.
- I always argued that development for mobile phones is a total pain and is years behind web development.
- I do some web development mainly using PHP, MySQL and jQuery.
- I’m an entrepreneur – (founder and CEO of NewACT, Cellibre and developer and admin of several web sites including this one and woofim.com which is a mobile mini blogging service)
The last point is important since I’m mostly interested in fast to very fast development of prototypes which some of them will turn to “real” products and some of them will be abandoned.
As I said above, I was arguing time after time to anyone who is willing to listen that development of applications and services for mobile phones is years behind web development. Just compare the development on J2ME or Symbian to Web…Things that take just a few days in the web world take months when trying to implement as a mobile application.
Web technologies find their way to mobile phone apps
And no, I’m not taking about mobile web or WAP sites. I’m talking about developing a full blown app using html, css, javascript or jQuery – which behaves as a “traditional” app and looks like an app and not as a web page.
There are few examples for these technologies – one is Nokia WRT (Web Runtime widgets) which allows development of mobile apps using Javascript, html and CSS (and yes, even jQuery !!!), another one is PhoneGap which allows similar development methodology for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry storm.
But first, what is WRT?
WRT or S60 Web Runtime “Widgets” is a portable and lightweight application framework that makes mobile web apps easy. It is an extension to the Webkit based browser engine on the S60 Platform – that allows instances of the browser to be run as if they are applications.One the most immediate advantages offered by WRT is the ease with which they can be created – using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (did someone say jQuery??). Web Runtime Technology allows these applications to be easily distributed and installed.
Getting started with WRT
In this tutorial I will try to share with you the process of developing a WRT widget for woofim.com from scratch. From selecting the IDE to submitting the app to OVI. I promise that I will do many mistakes (which I will share with you as well) but eventually we will have a WRT for my hobby mobile mini blogging service – woofim.com.
Next, selecting the IDE
- Introduction
- Selecting the IDE
- Designing the widget
- Our first Basic Nokia WRT Widget
- Deploying our Widget
