Today I revived my hope on Microsoft as I received the news that they released their brand new “product” for their fellow developers. The release I am talking about is the official Metro theme for jQuery Mobile. The awesome mobile framework finally got some Microsoft love.
In December of last year I got a new device to develop for, a HTC Titan, running the latest Windows Phone 7.5 Mango build. I loved the OS UI and how the applications were information-centric and not just eye-candy, but there was one problem, the same way C# is a incredible language for a lot of things, it’s parsing functions, for JSON specifically, are very difficult to learn and the articles about it were made for senior C# developers, which makes it difficult for beginners like me to understand them, at least I now can develop using the technology I love most for mobile development: Cordova (aka PhoneGap).
I always wanted to use Cordova for my WP7 projects but the Metro interface was way too complex to build from scratch and since the WP7 build of Cordova was on it’s early stages there were some features still to be implemented, for example there was no way to prevent the app from scrolling and some other things. Now there are plenty of plugins to make the app as native as possible and with the latest help from Microsoft, the Cordova development community has another great platform with almost full support of the native web app framework.
It’s great to see that Microsoft finally realized that the future of development has Javascript, HTML and CSS as the main languages. That’s why I have hopes that Boot to Gecko gets some market attraction and becomes a popular platform.