The phenomenon of mobile ecommerce has redefined traditional web development by demanding for mobile-friendly websites. The most notable of these changes have been registered in client scripting languages used for ecommerce site development. In essence, web development involves with programming website applications hosted via either the World Wide Web (internet), or intranet. The programming process incorporates among many other tasks, web design, content development, networking integration, security configuration, and client-side scripting. The present discussion will exclusively focus on the most advanced client-side scripting technologies, based on popular usage, for mobile ecommerce.
Choosing from Available Client Scripting Options
There are two available options for contemporary web development, unique to mobile ecommerce. On the one hand, was popular for traditional web development initiatives, where the site was already launched with a static design. The mobile phenomenon however came, and changed everything. Mobile ecommerce is urgently becoming the core of ecommerce, and most customers only access ecommerce sites from one or several mobile devices. These traditional sites have had to embrace dedicated web app development for every mobile device (singular device access). Such apps are optimized for the mobile phone, tablet, or smartphone.
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Regardless of their superior performance of the dedicated apps, however, this option has little support. The cost, server demands, and complexity of the web development process outweigh the second option. Modern web development now uses software solutions that combine all possible applications into an integrated platform for all and any mobile device including smart-watches. Notably, whichever of the two options one prefers, and before implementation, there is always the need to select the most effective client-side scripting. Based on popular usage by the most established ecommerce portals, the three languages listed below promise the most effective mobile web development, today.
Leading Client-Scripting Technologies for Mobile eCommerce
- Using the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)
One of the most common and widely used client-side scripting technologies is HTML, whose ease of usage and inter-device fluidity makes it a default choice for many web development experts. In web development, HTML is the standard language used for markup, used by over 70% of web pages, web platforms, and web applications currently online. Web development helps transform what is designed in form of HTML documents in servers or localized storage facilities, to multimedia pages. This has then opened, in recent developments, the potential for post-HTML scripting potential for creative user-based experience in ecommerce, all for purposes of increasing performance of an ecommerce site.
Previously, HTML provided cues that defined the appearance of a web document, but modern HTML technology has its core function being defining/describing a web page structure semantically. That is relatively not news at all. The news is that modern HTML now enables and facilitates programmers to embed customized programs and apps that are already written in diverse client-side scripting languages. Most common is the integration of JavaScript software applications that optimize how content of a web page behaves, improving the rather dormant presentation manual of only HTML. With CSS functionality, HTML now has a refined layout and visual appeal ideal for mobile ecommerce.
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- Using the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
CSS is not just used to enrich the dominance of HTML. Rather, CSS is the second most common and preferred scripting technology in use for mobile ecommerce. The dynamics of Cascading Style Sheets is a rather simplified mechanism that helps embed style into a web document. As such, CSS helps optimize a web page with an assortment of colors, fonts, font sizes, spacing, and indention, ideal for mobile access and presentation. A good example is how CSS has made modern ecommerce sites integrate visually engaging and responsive interfaces as part of customer experience, and one that is increasingly suitable for mobile applications.
Essentially, CSS is used in contemporary web development as a markup language to describe how a document is written and presented. CSS helps separate web page constitution (content) from the web page presentation (formatting), thus enabling the customization of its visual style. This reduces structural content in a web page, improves its presentations, and most importantly, improves accessibility, optimizes page controls by the user, reduces complexity of the user interface, eliminates repetitive coding, makes a page infinitely flexible. In other words, CSS activates the mobile age of web development applications by adding optimal graphic design into client-side scripting languages.
In other words, CSS is used to prescribe the visual style to a web page optimized for mobile access and usability. Modern ecommerce sites now use CSS to craft user interfaces that were initially written in either XHTML or HTML, to a complex combination of mobile ecommerce applications equally appealing for XML documents, SVG, plain XML, XUL, speech applications, and an assortment of multimedia applications. CSS is the secret behind recent flexibility of on-screen appeal across mobile devices, infinite printing preferences, voice activation for users either via browser or the screen reader, as well as Braille-based mobile devices
- Using JavaScript
Among the most esteemed technologies when creating latest web-based application is the JavaScript language. High-level in prestige, and extremely specialized in web development, JavaScript provides an un-typed, interpreted, and systematic programming language that has reached a global standard for client-side scripting. Any web developer today knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the only technologies in their scripting bible, where JavaScript ranks as the high-end option. When seeking improved conversion potential of an ecommerce site, JavaScript helps tap into the mobile-access market.
The potential for dynamic content, multi-paradigm scripting language, object-oriented presentation, and prototype-based functionality, helps adapt its graphics-based applications into a browser on any mobile device, without the need for plugins. Ultimately, JavaScript is a high-class assembly of functions and applications that use imperative, dynamic, and functional programming presentation that can be easily embedded on any ecommerce site.
Other Scripting Technologies to Look Out For
Besides HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, there are several other client-side scripting technologies emerging as facilitators of mobile ecommerce. The most famous of these include Ajax, which combines Asynchronous JavaScript and XML into a maze of web applications for a mobile user. In reality, Ajax is not a scripting technology, but an assembly of web development and application technologies among them CSS and HTML, to give an ecommerce site the dynamic adaptability essential for mobile access. By helping decouple the interchange layer of data, refine the page display, optimize behavior of the page layout, and make page content dynamic to a device's screen, Ajax has taken the potential of XML and JavaScript a notch higher, combining markup with style, and optimizing dynamic access asynchronously.
Another emerging trend in mobile ecommerce is the use of jQuery for unprecedented level of user-stimulated navigation, site manipulation, and responsive design. jQuery now exploits the JavaScript Framework Library and integrates Ajax development into a cross-platform design ideal for mobile access. Importantly, jQuery has simplified the client-side clipping common in HTML to a new level, to an extent that over 65% of the leading high-traffic ecommerce sites and web applications are now using the dynamic navigation potential of open-source and free jQuery software.
Then there is My Object-Oriented Tools (MooTools) now popular for ardent JavaScript developers. Simply put, MooTools is the lightweight of JavaScript client-side scripting whose optimized functionality is not only object-oriented but also uses extremely flexible coding for mobile access. With MooTools, a user has an interface and applications that are as flexible and as dynamic as any mobile device may require, despite integrating coherent APIs, powerful web development applications, layered content visualization, and an elegant presentation style.
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The foregoing list languages for client-side scripting have been made as popular and as widely used because of their technological potential in refining mobile ecommerce applications. It is also worth noting that, without subjective judgment, HTML is the single most used technology in ecommerce, while JavaScript is most common in advanced ecommerce portals. Whether the clients are using a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or mobile phone, these technologies help equally optimize the customer experience. What is evident in all of them is the ability to create customized apps for each ecommerce portal, and apps precisely coded for effective use by the contemporary ecommerce market. Without question, the age of client-side scripting is changing web-based applications available, in number, nature, form, and usage.