Bocoup on Air: Developing for the Mobile Web

We had so much fun with our first Bocoup on Air hangout that we decided to do it again. This time, I chatted with Boaz Sender about a mobile web app he’s been working on, and about the future of the web as an application development platform.

Most of our conversation was spent on a deep dive into the approach Boaz has been taking on the mobile web app he’s working on. We talked at length about how he’s making use of Backbone Boilerplate and RequireJS, and about how he’s structured the app so it basically builds itself — and its router — from content contained in JSON data.

We also talked about the backbone.routefilter plugin that Boaz built as part of working on the app — and about how open-sourcing that plugin ended up benefiting not only the Backbone community, but also the client.

We wrapped up with a conversation about a post from Paul Irish suggesting that the web is in a fight for its future against native app development. Fear not: we’re both still bullish on the web, though Boaz does fear that app stores — both native and web — haven’t advanced the game much beyond the days when we bought our software off the shelf at CompUSA.

Want to learn more? Check out these links:

• Backbone Boilerplate
• Backbone Boilerplate grunt task
• RequireJS
• backbone.routefilter
• Example of backbone.routefilter in use
• jQuery Mobile
• Lanyrd mobile app
• Paul Irish’s G+ post
• Zuckerberg on HTML5

Hope you enjoyed it! Now that we have two of these under our belts, we’re pretty excited about doing some more. Stay tuned to @bocoup on Twitter, or add Bocoup on Google+ to find out about the next Bocoup on Air. We’ll see you there.