Blogs

I will be representing Nitobi at Apple’s WWDC 2009 in San Francisco, and will be in the various after-conference parties about town. I will be in SF from Sunday June 7th to Friday afternoon June 12th.

If you’d like to meet up and chat, send me an e-mail at [email protected] or ping me on Twitter. See you there!

Well there is no state really, except for the proof of concept currently (by PhoneGap contributor Jose Noheda). I was re-factoring the PoC code, and getting everything working with the PhoneGap Javascript common code. In a nutshell, PhoneGap WinMo cannot use the existing PhoneGap js [1], as js support in the IE control in WinMo is too primitive. The current IE in WinMo is based on desktop IE 4 (released in 1997) and only supports JScript 3/Javascript 1.3.

So where does this leave PhoneGap WinMo? These are the ways we can proceed:

1. Have a totally separate Js codebase, based on JScript 3, for WinMo. Con: Maintenance nightmare?
2. Upgrade to IE Mobile 6. This discussion has its own section, below.
3. Use WebKit with Qt [5]. Pro: We can probably use Qt Webkit in Nokia phones (soon, not supported yet), because well, Nokia owns Qt. Con: Using Qt adds a 10MB overhead, minimum.
4. Use our own WebKit control. Con: I don’t know how long this effort will take, and it is the riskiest.

Internet Explorer Mobile 6

IE Mobile 6 is based on desktop IE 6 (which was released in 2001) but with the IE 8 Javascript engine [2]. However, only newer (unreleased as of yet) phones will get this version, according to Microsoft [3]. Although there are development emulator images available, they are no substitute for testing on a device.

Even if we somehow get IE Mobile 6 on existing phones (with unofficial ROMs, eg through xda forums[6]), .NET code cannot take advantage of this, because Microsoft does not want to break existing compatibility with existing code that uses hosted controls [4].

Footnotes:

[1] Sample PhoneGap Javascript code that fails under IE Mobile 4 JScript
http://pastie.org/485649

[2] IE Mobile 6 release blog post
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx

[3] IE Mobile 6 will not be available for current phones
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx#9063740 [All comments were deleted after the fact by MS]

[4] IE Mobile 6 will not be available in hosted controls (ie .NET WebBrowser component)
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx#9064039[All comments were deleted after the fact by MS]

[5] Qt toolkit
http://www.qtsoftware.com/

[6] XDA Developers forum
http://forum.xda-developers.com