June 05, 2012, 4:21 PM — A new HTML5 Browser Control lets enterprise mobile app developers quickly blend dynamic Web content with native and hybrid apps, using the cross-platform tools and middleware from Verivo Software.
With the new component, which is part of Verivo's AppStudio toolset, Web developers can use their HTML and Javascript skills to build mobile apps that can access a range of back-end enterprise databases and apps. And the Browser Control lets existing HTML5 content be quickly incorporated into mobile apps, alongside native app components.
BACKGROUND: Four reasons to jump to HTML5
A recent survey of enterprise software coders found higher-than-expected interest in HTML5 for mobile apps. [See "Interest in HTML5 growing among mobile developers"] Seventy-nine percent of nearly 2,200 mobile developers in the study said they will use HTML5 in their apps in 2012, a big jump compare to an earlier survey in late 2011.
Verivo's introduction of its new Browser Control, and its roadmap for future HTML5 features, is part of a trend by application tools vendors to use the emerging HTML5 standards in building and deploying mobile applications. These applications can run inside a HTML5 browser or be wrapped as part of a native application, to display Web content.
Rivals such as SAP's Sybase Unwired Platform, Antenna Software, Appcelerator, Appsbar and many others, offer competing services but there are wide differences in their approach, architecture and capabilities.
Mozilla.org, creator of the Firefox Web browser, has even greater ambitions for HTML5: making it the basis for eliminating conventional mobile operating systems, and instead replacing them with a very small Linux kernel and drivers, to support Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Coupled with a growing array of new APIs, and a user interface dubbed Gaia, the platform can fully control the phone and its features without the complexity of a conventional OS. [See: "Mozilla's 'modest proposal:' Dump the smartphone OS"]
