When Symbian was formed 10 years ago, it inherited a browser from Psion. In the following years, the ability to browse real Web pages became a key differentiator of smartphones as compared to feature phones, and so Web technologies have played an important role in the story of Symbian. At the time of Symbian’s formation, there was much debate in the industry on whether the future of personal and enterprise computing would be in thick or thin clients – that is, in rich client software running mainly on the phone, or software hosted on a network server with a fairly simple browsing terminal. Ten years later and we see AJAX blurring the gap between the notion of thin and thick clients with rich browsing terminals backed with colossal arrays of servers dishing out email, photos, twitters and Facebook messages.
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Over the last 12 years, Microsoft Corporation has developed a successful operating system for mobile devices based on Windows CE, currently known as Windows Mobile. The Windows Mobile deliverable consists of (1) a particular set of Windows CE components, (2) a logo test kit requirements document, (3) a set of light weight middleware applications, and (4) commercialization components, such as drivers and value-added services provided by OEMs and Mobile Operators. Microsoft licenses the Windows Mobile OS to third parties, (generally OEMs and MOs), who commercialize and sell the operating system as part of a device and service offering.
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Current search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are prevalent for searching the Web. Search in dynamic pages, however, is either inexistent or far from perfect. AJAX and Rich Internet Application are such applications. They are increasingly frequent on the Web (in YouTube, Amazon, GMail, Yahoo!Mail) or mobile devices and are offering a high degree of interactivity to the user, by seamlessly loading content from the server without the need to refresh the page. Current search engines cannot correctly index AJAX applications. This produces false positives and false negatives, because search engines do not understand the application logic that loads content dynamically. Crawling an AJAX application is a difficult problem. Since the user invokes events on the page, crawling must identify the different application states generated by the client-side logic.
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The phenomenon known as Web 2.0 is more than just the web today. Reaching far beyond the browser, this name for live, interactive, user-manipulable data has come to define RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) and RDAs (Rich Desktop Applications). These represent a new generation of Internet-compatible applications that can be implemented across multiple platforms on personal computers, as well as mobile devices (PDAs, smartphones, etc.).
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