A much-discussed topic at the moment is the development of mobile web applications. New technologies make it possible for web developers to easily develop an application for, for example, Android or iPhone.
One advantage of web applications for smartphones is that developers bypass iTunes or the Android Market and make their applications available to the target audience in a simple manner. However, you can also make perfect use of Google to have your application appear in search results.
Some disadvantages of developing a mobile web application speak for themselves. After all, the developer has no way to utilize the full functionalities of the smartphone, such as controlling the camera or, for example, using the built-in G-Sensor.
Additionally, one might wonder whether it is practical to develop applications that cannot be used without an internet connection or with a slow GPRS connection on your smartphone. After all, many enthusiastic smartphone users are always online, but the speed of mobile internet makes it less attractive to retrieve large amounts of data from the server and use it in your mobile web app. The new HTML5 specifications can help us improve the speed of web apps.
HTML storage, what is it and how did it originate?
Native apps have the advantage that data can be stored on the user's local computer (smartphone). With web apps, the developer is often limited to a database that he can access via the internet to make information accessible. This requires an internet connection, and bandwidth must be used to send data back and forth.
In the early days of Internet Explorer, Microsoft implemented a feature that allowed users to store data on their computer. This involved only 64 KB of storage, without any possibility to expand it. Since then, there have been many developments to improve or expand this technology.
Web developers did their best back then to send information from page to page via cookies. However, cookies are passed along with every click while navigating through the application to and from the server. This requires an internet connection, and this is a drain on the mobile user's bandwidth—a true performance killer for mobile web apps.
What are the possibilities of the HTML5 storage specification?
HTML5 Storage is a method for storing up to 5 MB of information in the user's web browser. Depending on the variant used, the information remains available until the session is terminated.
The storage function can be used in many modern web browsers, starting from Internet Explorer version 8. Additionally, the functionality has been implemented in the latest generation of iPhone and Android smartphones. This makes it ideally suited for the development of mobile web apps.
HTML5 storage makes it possible to store data locally and only send it to the server after the developer has written a function for this. It can therefore be perfectly used as a caching mechanism to store information retrieved from a database on the user's smartphone. A drastic improvement in mobile web app performance!
A practical example
As a developer, I create a mobile web app that can be used on many modern smartphones. I can do this without taking into account the operating system running on these smartphones.
My application retrieves the last 50 tweets from my Twitter timeline and displays them in an attractive interface optimized for mobile use. To retrieve these tweets, I need an internet connection that connects to the Twitter API and retrieves the tweets from my timeline.
After viewing the details of a tweet, I want to return to the overview view to view my timeline again. Without the HTML5 storage specification, I would likely have relied on my smartphone's limited bandwidth again. HTML5 storage now gives developers the ability to place the retrieved Twitter stream in the smartphone's memory so that it does not need to be retrieved via the internet again.
Using local memory is, of course, always many times faster than using an internet connection. This combination is therefore a huge performance boost for mobile web apps!