Mobile Applications with TouchKit

which are described in a dedicated section. We treat phone and tablet applications separately, and discuss testing briefly.

Vornitologist and Mobile Mail Demos

The Vornitologist is a demo application that showcases most of the features in TouchKit. You can try it out at http://demo.vaadin.com/vornitologist with your iOS or Android device. You can read the sources on-line or check them out from the repository and import them in Eclipse as described in Section 22.3.3, “Importing the Vornitologist Demo”.

The Mobile Mail is another demo application, which shows how to implement browsing of deep category trees and make forms.

Licensing

Vaadin TouchKit is a commercial product licensed under a dual-licensing scheme. The AGPL license allows open-source development, while the CVAL license needs to be purchased for closed-source use, including web deployments and internal use. Commercial licenses can be purchased from the Vaadin Directory, where you can also find the license details and download Vaadin TouchKit.

22.2. Considerations Regarding Mobile Browsing

When developing web applications that support mobile browsing, you need to consider various issues that are different from non-mobile use. TouchKit is designed to help with these issues.

22.2.1. Mobile Human Interface

Mobile devices use very different human interfaces than regular computers. For example, the screen can be rotated easily to switch between portrait and landscape views. This does not just change the dimensions of the display, but also affects the most useful layout.

The user interface is used with a finger instead of a mouse, so there are no features such as "right-finger-button". Double-tap is not normally used in mobile user interfaces, unlike the doubleclick with a mouse. Instead, a "long tap" usually has the same meaning as the double click. Finger gestures also play a large role, such as using a vertical swipe gesture for scrolling instead of a scroll bar.

There is normally no physical but a virtual keyboard, and the keyboard can change depending on the context. You also need to ensure that it does not hide the input field to which the user is trying to enter data when it pops up. This should be handled by the browser, but is among the issues that requires special testing.

22.2.2. Bandwidth

Mobile Internet connections are often significantly slower than with fixed lines. With a low-end mobile connection, such as 384 kbps, just loading the Vaadin client-side engine can take several seconds.This can be helped by compiling a widget set that includes only the widgets for the used components, as described in Section 22.8, “Building an Optimized Widget Set”.

Even with mobile broadband, the latency can be significant factor, especially with highly interactive rich applications. The latency is usually almost unnoticeable in fixed lines, typically less than 100 ms, while mobile Edge connections typically have latency around 500 ms, and sometimes much

478	Vornitologist and Mobile Mail Demos