How Rich Are Mobile Rich Internet Applications?

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile devices become more and more powerful and they offer continuously growing capability in terms of computing capability, size of screen, available memory, etc. It causes that delivering applications on mobile devices is even more attractive and draws attention of many software producers. However, variety of mobile devices and incompatibility of their operating systems makes very difficult and costly to implement an application with rich functionality which may be installed and used on different types of mobile devices. The solution to this problem can be Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) which are accessible via Internet browsers enhanced by the standardized functionality supporting RIAs.

In this paper we characterize required properties of Rich Internet Applications and present the important factors which should be taken into consideration during development of RIAs on mobile devices. We describe Gears platform, which is a good example of RIA platform enhancing functionality of Internet browsers, and present Mobile Wikipedia Application - the example of Rich Internet Application on mobile devices.