Tag: mobile web development

At Google I/O 2011, we showcased a mobile web app. Many asked about its development timeline. Work began on March 3rd, with core coding starting on March 25th. While the calendar time was just over a month, the effort was spread across four engineers, each dedicating about 20% of their time to their respective UI using the FormFactorJS framework. This setup facilitated isolated development, with the flexibility to inject custom code per form factor and a common base controller in controller.js. We also developed and leveraged two frameworks, LeviRoutes and FormfactorJS, to efficiently consolidate common logic and specialize the controller according to form factors.

During our Google IO talk on Mobile Web Development, we received a great question about handling AppCache storage limits in modern browsers. Our approach was straightforward: we primarily used AppCache for program code, including CSS and JS, along with the main page. Our application's size remained manageable, helped by minifying the JS in our production build using uglifyJS. Although we could have compressed the CSS, we prioritized ease of development. If space became an issue, our plan was to AppCache only form-factor specific code and assets, but thankfully, that wasn't necessary.