So, AJAX is all the rage these days. One of the reasons I think it's become so popular recently is that it's very wide spread. Since it's been possible since 1998, browsers have had quite some time to get support in.

Well, with the power of mobile phones these days I thought I would do some research to see if there might be some mobile browser that supports something similar to AJAX. That is, being able to embed a scripting language on a web page that can make it's own web requests and parse the responses for placement into a DHTML page.

I figured the best way to go about doing this is by doing some googling. Ironically enough, the first thing that came up was about Google, AJAX, and their wifi network so it could enable mobile AJAX. Yeah, but from a laptop. Not quite what I was looking for.

Continuing down the list, I found a bunch of talk about a potential future language called MIL. There used to be WMLScript, but that seems to have gone away with WML. It didn't have much capability, anyway.

I haven't been able to figure out much about MIL. It seems like it's a language being developed by a new company. Unfortunately, that means it's both far out, risky, and not useful today.

So, it would appear that there is no mobile equivalent to AJAX available. Sure, you can do AJAX directly on Windows Mobile devices and the like. But if you wanted to try to do AJAX on the Openwave browser, well, you were dreaming.

For now, we'll have to stick with doing BREW and J2ME applications on our mobile devices.

So, no, it can't be.

Moblets: MIL is AJAX in disguise!

Ajaxian: Ajax for Mobile Devices: MIL

TopXML: Ajax for mobile devices with MIL... (XML News)

Posted by Shane on November 6, 2005 9:30 PM | Permalink