Motorola's WebUI application environment allows developers to create mobile web applications, from lightweight widgets through truly personal, context-aware mobile web applications, using familiar web technologies such as AJAX, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. WebUI provides a rich set of APIs that integrate information from the web with local device services such as multimedia, location, browser, phonebook, and more.

The WebUI application environment is based on WebKit, the popular open source engine that powers the MOTOMAGX browser as well as widgets for Apple's, Nokia's, and Google's mobile platforms. WebUI supports two categories of applications – WebUI widgets and full-featured WebUI applications.

WebUI widgets are narrowly scoped web applications that provide a miniature view in the WebUI Widget Library. From there, a user can select a widget and drill down to view more information on the device's full screen.

Full-featured WebUI applications run, feel, and act like a native application and deliver richer, full-screen Web 2.0 services. WebUI applications are frequently interactive and use the rich set of APIs to access device resources and services. For example, a social networking application could allow users to share their locations using the location-based services on the device, or a device dashboard widget could display detailed information about the device status, such as the cellular signal strength and battery reserve. For a consistent user experience, an application can invoke the user interface services of the native applications installed on the device, such as the Contact Picker service used by the Contacts application.

MOTOMAGX is Motorola's first mobile platform to support WebUI, with other mobile platforms to follow in the future. To help you create your WebUI applications, MOTODEV provides a wide range of resources, from technical documentation to developer tools. Beginning with MOTODEV Studio for Java ME, Studio products will soon expand to support the WebUI application environment on the MOTOMAGX platform. Learn more »