Mobile Web Development: Building mobile websites, SMS and MMS messaging, mobile payments, and automated voice call systems with XHTML MP, WCSS, and mobile AJAX (Paperback)

~ Nirav Mehta (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

In Detail

As more users access the Web from their phones and other handhelds, web developers need to learn techniques for targeting these new devices. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google target mobiles with their services and products. Companies use mobile services to provide staff access to their applications while away from a computer.

This book is a complete, practical guide to writing mobile websites and applications. You will learn how to create mobile-friendly websites, adapt your content to the capabilities of different devices, save bandwidth with compression, and create server-side logic that integrates with a mobile front end. You will also see other methods for integrating your web application with mobile technology: sending and receiving MMS and SMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and working with voice calls to provide spoken interaction.

The book illustrates every technique with practical examples, showing how to use these development methods in the real world. Along the way we show how an example pizza delivery business can use these methods to open up to the mobile web.
Whether you want to provide customers and users of your public website with new ways to access your services, or build applications so that staff can stay up to date while on the road, this book will show you all you need to build a powerful mobile presence.

Technologies and tools covered in the book

PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP), Wireless CSS, WAP 2.0, Tera WURFL, MyMobileWeb, Mobile Web Toolkit, Image Server, GAIA Image Transcoder, HAWHAW , ready.mobi, Nokia's Mobile Internet Toolkit , SMIL, Voxeo's Prophecy server, VoiceXML (VXML), grXML, Frost library, WALL, WURFL, SMS, MMS, mobile payment gateways, mobile widgets, Mobile AJAX, Android, Google Gears, and Dojo Offline.

What you will learn from this book?

• Build a mobile-friendly front end for your site - learn XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) and Wireless CSS (WCSS), the CSS subset supported by mobile devices; target the full range of mobile browsers; adapt automatically to the capabilities of the device.

• Write interactive mobile applications - present and process mobile forms with different input types; support keypad navigation; get started with Mobile Ajax and JavaScript.
• Accept payments online via mobile web and SMS using Paypal, SMS short codes, and more.
• Integrate your application with SMS and MMS messages - enable users to send SMS and MMS messages to your site, process them, and send SMS and MMS messages back to your users too; set up your own SMS gateway, or choose an existing gateway provider; include slideshows, movies, and sounds.
• Handle voice calls - respond to voice input, create touchtone services, play pre-recorded voice or use text-to-speech to provide voice-based software.
• Future-proof your application - understand the basics of iPhone development, the Android platform, and the implications of other developments in the mobile space.
  

Approach

The author adopts a fast-paced, practical approach to developing for the mobile web. The book focuses on solutions, pragmatic tips, and fast results rather than theory.

Each chapter focuses on an aspect of taking a pizza delivery company onto the mobile web. This ensures that the chapters remain practical and realistic, focusing on getting things done. The book also provides discussion and reference material to help you apply the techniques to your own projects.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for web developers who want to provide mobile support for their applications.

The book assumes some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The reader should also know a server-side language. The examples in the book use PHP, but can be adapted easily to other languages. The book does not use J2ME, focusing instead on using the phone's web browser and other standard features.

About the Author

Nirav Mehta

Nirav Mehta is renowned for his entrepreneurial ventures, his breakthrough ideas, and his contribution to open source. Nirav leads a software development company - Magnet Technologies - from India that specializes in Rich Internet Applications, Web, and Mobile. Nirav believes in simplifying the most complicated ideas and presenting them in lucid language.

Over the last ten years, Nirav has written and spoken on a variety of topics. He has also been instrumental in localization efforts in India and training programmers to be effective developers.

He has set up a website completely dedicated to the book. You can find more information on it here: cmsbook.info

Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (February 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847193439
• ISBN-13: 978-1847193438
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #274,611 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #27 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Mobile & Wireless Computing > Programming
  #39 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > Ajax
  #49 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > XHTML

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars covers several topics for cellphone apps, February 25, 2008

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Mehta instructs about coding for cellphones, covering topics ranging from GUI development to accessing a database server.

If you already have experience writing GUIs for desktop or web applications, then the GUI part of the text should be dead simple. Of necessity, there is a severely constrained graphic environment on the cellphone. It is good, in the sense that you don't have much to learn, and almost certainly, the complexity of your GUI should be low. Of course, the tradeoff is this very constraint. You are very limited in the images and widgets you can display. Back to basics, one might say.

Hopefully, you'd have dealt with database schema and designs in other contexts. The text's coverage of this is somewhat abbreviated. Enough is given for the book's main example to be nontrivial. But this is not a database book; just keep it in mind.

Payment is a no-doubt germane issue for some developers. The text describes how eBay's Paypal can be used for billing purposes.

The other interesting topic in the book is a brief explanation of Interactive Voice Response systems. Since after all, the user can talk into her cellphone. Just as for databases, IVRs have their own complexity, hinted at here.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to mobile web programming, April 21, 2008

By	Joseph Dolson (Saint Paul, MN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a quick and effective introduction to developing websites specifically targeted at mobile device users. I say "users" for a reason -- one of the strongest advantages to the book is a strong focus on considering your user and their needs as a key element of mobile web development.

My overall reaction to this book was positive. It covers a wide variety of key issues for mobile web programming in an easily understood manner. The book is targeted primarily at developers who already have some experience at web development and design, so it doesn't delve into any serious detail when it comes to server-side programming or HTML coding, but instead makes a point of emphasizing places where the mobile web is different from internet interaction on a desktop device.

Mehta goes out of his way on many occasions to emphasize the serious importance of considering who (and what!) will be using your mobile web application.

"Any website accessed from a mobile device is mobile web -- whether it's been tailored to work on a mobile or not!" (Mobile Web Development, Nirav Mehta, page 10)

The book covers a wide range of issues -- from developing for mobile devices using a "lowest common denominator" plan to implementing highly dynamic mobile applications which adapt automatically to the device currently in use. The text is easy to understand and follows a logical progression, starting with the mobile web development practices which are most similar to the development of standard web applications before moving into the areas which are very specifically targeted towards mobile devices.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource!, July 12, 2008

By	Techie Evan - See all my reviews

This excellent book provides a fast-paced overview of issues impacting mobile web development and approaches to coping with them. If you want to learn how to build standards-based mobile web sites, this book can help you get there in a hurry!