In this moment I’m on a train heading back to Rome from the Novotel Hotel in Milan where I participated in the Vodafone widget developer port-a-thon (October 5 and 6). Vodafone and the JIL team provided a presentation of the upcoming JIL Developer Portal, market opportunity associated to mobile widgets and brand new devices. But above all this meeting has been a working session: I had to bring my laptop and to roll up my sleeves and get to work. The JIL team provided us user experience guidelines, quality criteria to follow for a widget to be accepted for publishing, showed how to port a real mobile widget and supported us all the time in developing our widgets through JIL Widget SDK and JIL Software Development Kit (Eclipse-based IDE). The JIL team also provided brand new devices on which we installed our widgets for testing purpose.

I come from mobile web site and application development for mobile handsets, and mobile widgets are rather a new thing for me despite I had to deal with Nokia Web Runtime some months ago. At first glance mobile widgets seem to incorporate all advantages associated on both classic mobile applications and browser “applications” (i.e. mobile web sites):

• Web technology
• Low learning curve
• Portability
• Easy to Layout
• Offine content store
• One Package

However JIL Widget SDK is actually far from perfect: lack of features (to be implemented), device heterogeneity and limitations, different Web RunTimes to be handled. Fortunately the JIL project, currently in Beta, consists of a skilled team of developers and a large community, so I’m sure platform stability will be improved, missing features will be implemented and new features will be added.