MobUser

Last week mFoundry announced that Spotlight, which runs on Mojax, would support the iPhone. The question of how we would enable a Mojax Moblet to run on an iPhone has been a discussion topic around the expresso machine for several months. Mojax as a language is comprised of an XML based markup, CSS, Javascript, and a “Mobile” object model. By design, there is substantial overlap between the Mojax language and standard AJAX. As a result, the task of supporting iPhone will be the task of “transcoding” Mojax AJAX into standard AJAX.

Many approaches to transcoding Mojax were considered, but at the end of the day we decided that we would use OpenLaszlo as the target for the transcoder instead of directly transcoding MJX files into DHTML. I could list many reasons why OpenLaszlo is the better method of generating DHTML, but at the end of the day it came down to the fact that we all really hate working with HTML. OpenLaszlo’s language constructs and object model is pretty close to our own which will make the task of transcoding much simpler. An additional benefit to creating an OpenLaszlo transcoder is the fact that the Moblet, once transcoded, could also run as a Flash application.

It should be noted that by having a DHTML/AJAX transcoder for your Moblet also means that, in addition to running on an iPhone, your Moblets could also:

• Run within an iFrame on your website
• Run as a Gadget on your iGoogle home page
• Run as a portlet in Netvibes
• Run as a Widget on your Mac

Pretty cool stuff!

Technorati Tags: AJAX, mFoundry, mobile, mojax, OpenLaszlo, transcoding