Revisiting JQueryMobile

For some reason I have been taking another look at JQueryMobile. I looked at this in the middle of last year and at the time really liked it even though it was in beta at the time. I had a few complaints and the major one was its' performance on android. At the time me and many other assumed it was JQuerMobile at fault rather than the android browser. As it became clear the default android browser was quite rubbish my interest waned.

The plan had been to use JQueryMobile to write apps that could be wrapped around a very simple Java application and released onto the android market. My reasoning behind this was that is is quicker to write polished looking application in JQueryMobile (its defaults look nice) than using Java. Plus using CoffeeScript is nicer than using Java for small sub 1000 line projects.

I can't comment on larger projects as I have not used CoffeeScript for projects with more lines of code than a few thousand. Realistically it is probably not the language that add to the productivity but the quicker iteration cycle of using a desktop browser to develop rather than a real phone or the emulator.

So JQueryMobile has continued to improve. I still like it and it still does not work on android very well as far as I can tell. I have not tested it but many people still hit problems. Perhaps with the next version of android things will get better. With the recent release of chrome for android and rumours of a official Google tablet in May perhaps we will not have to wait for too long.

Then again you never know.

I of course have a whole load of small applications I would like to write should android get itself into gear in-terms of a descent WebView component so I can code simple application the way I want to.