To help guide the future development of the cross-platform mobile software CliniPEARLS (that powers our BC Guidelines app), we’ve recently been exploring options beyond native applications the mobile web. Part of that strategy is to explore and evaluate several tools that could help us develop mobile websites.
In the table below we explain our criteria for comparison, as well as our conclusions and recommendations.
ComponentOne | jQuery Mobile | Visual WebGui | |
Learning Curve | Very Good Familiar with ASP.NET |
Very Good HTML5 syntax, based on JQuery and JQuery UI foundation |
Good .NET GUI Toolkit |
Efficiency of the development tools | Very good MS Visual Studio, dedicated iPhone controls, drag-and-drop GUI |
Good Drag-and-drop GUI included |
Good MS Visual Studio, drag-and-drop GUI |
Developer Support | Poor Tech support failed to answer any of our questions during the evaluation period. |
Poor | Fair Offer technical support package and community forum |
Documentation | Fair User forums and examples |
Good Decent library of examples |
Good Have different version documentation |
Aesthetics | Very Good iPhone-like aspect. But customization is not easy |
Very Good Supports easy theming, styling with CSS or online tools |
Good ‘HTML5’ aspect |
Speed | Fair | Fair Requires initial download of 61kb library. After that, execution speed is fairly smooth. |
Fair |
Cross Platform | Good iPhone: very good Android: good Nokia: fair Blackberry: ? |
Very Good 3-level “degradable” platform support: A: Full Experience B: Full Experience Minus AJAX C: Basic HTML |
Bad iPhone: good Android: slider not working Nokia: fair Blackberry: ? |
Price | $1100 / developer with platinum support; $677 / developer subscription renewal license |
Free, open-source | $749 Pro Studio with 1 year subscription; $1399 Pro Studio with 2 year subscription |
Conclusion | Good for rapid development, prototyping; Speed and compatibility with some devices may be a concern | Good for building graphical elements on the mobile. Compatible with broad range of mobile devices that degrades with less capable browsers. | Easy to use, but still too buggy |
Because of compatibility concerns, it makes sense to think of using ComponentOne as a fast way to design the prototype of a website if we needed a quick test or to demo a possible feature. It seems, however, that developing full websites with jQuery is the most promising option at this point.
By engaging potential user groups in the development process, we can gather a better sense of user experiences with the websites developed by using these various technologies.
In order to assess the capabilities of these platforms, we built three versions of a mock-up mobile website. Try these examples on your mobile phone at http://137.82.134.27/mobile. For more detailed information on how these technologies work, you can read our Powerpoint presentation on the topic.