Exploring the Mobile Web

Mileage Stats Mobile

This is a reference application and part of Project Liike.

Project Liike is an effort by the Microsoft patterns & practices team to produce guidance to help organizations build mobile web experiences based off of existing web applications. Its focus is on delivering HTML5 applications to a wide variety devices.

This reference application, which we call Mileage Stats Mobile, began with the source from a previous effort Project Silk. Project Silk was about building cross-browser web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. However, it was optimized for desktop browser. Project Silk's reference application was simply called Mileage Stats. In the context of Project Liike we'll refer to it as the legacy desktop experience.

Project Liike is about extending and enhancing Mileage Stats with a mobile experience.

Notes from the Journey

Mileage Stats Mobile is just one part of Project Liike. It's a journey and a learning experience for our team to build the application. We are recording our learning, insights, and frustrations along the way. We'll be publishing the distillation of these into our docs repository.

We want your feedback, comments, and questions. Keep us honest.

Three Experiences

We think of the application as providing three experiences.

The first is the Legacy experience mentioned above. We deliver this if the server determines that the client browser is not a mobile browser.

The second is the Works experience. We deliver this as the standard baseline experience or when the server knows little about the client browser's capabilities. It is intended to work well on devices with limited resources (including network, CPU, screen size, etc.).

The third is the Wow experience. We deliver this when it is determined that the client browser can support JavaScript, JSON, XHR, and DOM manipulation. The Wow and Works experiences are closely related however. Works is a subset of Wow, and generally follows a pattern of Progressive Enhancement. A key enhancement of Wow is providing the application as a Single Page Application (SPA).

When running the application, the text "SPA" will appear in header when that mode is enabled.

Running the Reference Application

The minimum requirement for building and running Mileage Stats Mobile is:

The simplest way to get Visual Studio and MVC is to use the Web Platform Installer.

Once everything is installed and you've downloaded the source, you'll need to make sure that all of the project's dependencies are present.

Installing Dependencies

You have a couple of options.

Project Principles

Known Issues