jQuery Mobile Directions ASP.NET or MVC

Question

I work for a good sized healthcare organization as a web developer and have recently been tasked with developing a set of standards and possible reference applications for mobile development. Our current methodology relies heavily on asp.net 3.5 along with a large framework library that is common across all of our applications.

I have just begun to dabble with jQuery Mobile and it appears that any solution or direction we come up with will lean heavily on that framework.

Questions:

1. Is it reasonable or not to attempt a jQuery Mobile solution on top of asp.net web forms? I realize that jQuery Mobile does not make use of post backs in a traditional web forms fashion, but can it be done? How much better would a MVC solution be? (I have worked with both and don't want to get into a bigger Web Forms vs MVC discussion but wonder if one just works better with jQuery Mobile than the other.)

2. How is data saved within a jQuery Mobile application? I get the data-role="page" idea but is data typically saved to the back-end web server via ajax calls that do not rely on traditional client post backs? If not, then how? If it typically does rely on ajax, then is the idea of using Web Forms just silly?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Our company is a large after-market parts supplier in North America. We currently have several asp.net web forms sites (moving away from) and a growing collection of MVC 3 Web Apps and APIs.

We recently rolled out our first jQuery Mobile powered web app and it was surprising how easy it was. It did really help that this project was architected well and so the jqm site was able to gather most of its data and content quickly through our Core and Service layers.

I highly recommend creating a template for building out your mobile pages. I'll update soon with a sample if that will help, its helped me tremendously because there is only so much you really want to push away into a master page. And I believe MVC 4 has jQuery Mobile packed into it as a new template.

1. No, I would think it would be difficult to transition an asp.net web forms site to jQuery Mobile (think ViewState nightmares). Yes, it can be done but in my experience, asp.net web forms are bulky compared to their MVC counterparts when constructed properly - but again maybe thats biased on my poor experiences with HTML bloat caused by ASP controls and ViewState.

2. You can manage data in several ways using a jQuery Mobile powered site. With MVC, we use traditional form elements where needed or post back through ajax when it makes sense. Remember you can always turn off the default ajax page loads/posts with the data-ajax="false" attribute or at the app level with ajaxEnabled option. Of course, something get stuck directly into Session as needed. Often times, a mobile site is more for consuming data than producing it. Based on that philosophy, I would think that its ok to use ajax and therefore MVC may be a better choice.

Maybe its just my view of things because I've had the luxury (and testability) of working with MVC over the last few years... but yeah, in contrast it may be silly to use an asp.net web form app with your organizations jQuery Mobile site if you could instead use MVC.

Hope this helps!