Websites through a PDA - DEVELOPMENT

[pmanson]

Hi All,

I need to develop a website for my final year project and I want to be able to view it through a PDA (wirelessly).

The website will basically be a front end for a database and will need to be viewed both on the PDA and via a normal pc/laptop.

Can people give me some advice? Need to do some background reading on suitable languages that I could use.

Also is it better to develop 2 sites (one for the pda and one for normal web viewing?)


Sorry for the lack detail in the questions!


Thanks,

Phill

[jimothy]

Best advice, make it simple and small! Try viewing PH through a PDA and you'll see that size does matter.

[_dobbo_]

pmanson said:

Also is it better to develop 2 sites (one for the pda and one for normal web viewing?)

This depends on what your site content is. If you design for a PDA, your site will potentially look rubbish in a browser - and vice versa.

Assuming you have a scripting language on the server, you can almost certainly detect the browser type at connection time and display an appropriate page depending on what you get.

[agent006]

Look no firther than where you are now. Pistonheads displays perfectly on my Blackberry, it's about teh only site that does.

[PetrolTed]

Certain pages on PH are more PDA friendly than others. The classified listings page I spent quite bit of time on making it size friendly (I think!).

In some respects it would be easy to develop a seperate set of pages for PDAs and I may well do that. A fully compatible page is a pain in the neck and probably still to graphic intense for PDAs. The thought of having two seperate sites to maintain is also a PITA though.

[BliarOut]

Use includes for content and wrap them up in different front ends. Your queries etc. can remain exactly the same for both sites.

It's probably easier if you are just starting out this way. As Ted says, it's much more tricky to adapt something that already exists as you are probably constrained by formatting etc.

[jimothy]

agent006 said:

Look no firther than where you are now. Pistonheads displays perfectly on my Blackberry, it's about teh only site that does.

Doesn't work very well on my Clie, but that not very wide and I can't find a browser that rotates the screen.

[pmanson]

_dobbo_ said:

pmanson said: Also is it better to develop 2 sites (one for the pda and one for normal web viewing?) This depends on what your site content is. If you design for a PDA, your site will potentially look rubbish in a browser - and vice versa. Assuming you have a scripting language on the server, you can almost certainly detect the browser type at connection time and display an appropriate page depending on what you get.

Its going to be an asset tracking system.

I want it too look as simple as possible. (I'm going to aim to get everything on one screen if its on the laptop and a couple of screens if its on the pda). Though i'll need to do some analysis to make sure its feasible.

[Alex]

The Gassing Station is a good example, as the drop down menu at the top doesn't work in Pocket IE.

[PetrolTed]

The drop down menus will go in the next version of the gassing station for that very reason.

One solution is to use XML to generate the data for the page and then two different XSLs to display the content in different ways. That's how I do the map/quick view/list views of the classifieds data. To code each of those from scratch would have taken weeks. Once the XML was there though a different view doesn't take too long at all.

[judas]

CSS is your friend here. Design using a pure CSS layout and you can completely change the look and feel of the website with a simple change of style sheet. Take a look at www.csszengarden.com to see what's possible with just CSS and HTML. Then you can use the back-end language of your choice to do the functional stuff and break down the page into header, content, footer etc. to keep easy to maintain.

[PetrolTed]

judas said:

CSS is your friend here. Design using a pure CSS layout and you can completely change the look and feel of the website with a simple change of style sheet. Take a look at www.csszengarden.com to see what's possible with just CSS and HTML. Then you can use the back-end language of your choice to do the functional stuff and break down the page into header, content, footer etc. to keep easy to maintain.

I think the reality is somewhat different though. Particularly with PDA type pages you end up using CSS to hide images etc, trouble is they're still being downloaded.

I'm a big fan of CSS but I find XML/XSL is the first solution I've really come across that genuinely seperates content from style/presentation.