O’Reilly: Inside RIA

One of the greatest frustrations when building RIAs for mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Safari, Webkit for the Android and Palm, and even IE for Windows Mobile phones is the lack of functional testing tools. Yet if you are making a RIA that is complicated or used for critical work, it behooves you to develop some approach to testing that is not completely manual. Furthermore, if you are serious about performance, you need to make sure your application is working functionally so you can create performance profiles that reflect a solid working application.

With the growing popularity of smart phones like the iPhone and Google’s Android, as well as new players on the market like Palm’s Pre, the idea of having an always-connected general computational device is finally being realized. Today’s smart phones are not only used for making calls, taking pictures, and listening to music; now people are using their phones to do business, build presentations, make quick edits to important files, and even surf the web. Yet contrary to what the commercials would have you believe, few smart phones provide a web experience equivalent even to a netbook.