Now that we decided on a domain and target platform of our DSL, it is time to explore our target platform. Although I have used HTML, CSS and Javascript for many years, I never looked that seriously into the possibilities of especially CSS and Javascript. To help me with that I’ve been reading a few books:
- Javascript: The Good Parts, excellent book about Javascript, helping you avoid all that bad parts
- jQuery in Action, good book about jQuery
- Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript, free online book from O’Reilly
In addition there are a number of great blog posts and libraries helping to develop native-looking web applications for the iPhone:
- Make the most of the iPhone SDK
- Universal iPhone UI library, many nice CSS tricks
- QTouch, jQuery extensions for iPhone web apps
- iPhone Native looking skin
And a number of performance related posts from Google (from the Gmail team that developed the excellent Gmail mobile application):
- HTML5 and Webkit pave the way for mobile web applications
- Suggestions for better performance
- Using AppCache to launch offline – Part 1
- Using AppCache to launch offline – Part 2
- Using AppCache to launch offline – Part 3
- Cache patterns for offline HTML5 applications
- Auto-growing textareas
- A Common API for web storage
Because eventually I want to add automatic data synchronization support to our DSL, I’m also looking into synchronization strategies. I found a nice post about that. Of course, Apple’s own iPhone web app documentation is also very useful.
Tags: dsl, javascript, mobile