Kicking off its annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco Wednesday,
Saleforce.com announced that it's embracing HTML5 to better support
tablets and other mobile devices. It also announced it will open up
its Chatter app to external collaborators and third-party apps.
Following in the footsteps of Facebook and other consumer sites
that have developed touch-optimized versions of their websites,
Salesforce announced that touch.salesforce.com will deliver an
HTML5-based version of the vendor's core applications, and
eventually the extended library of applications build on the
Force.com development platform.
The promise of HTML5 is to be able to write Web-based applications
once and deliver them across a variety of mobile platforms and
devices without native development work--it doesn't quite live up
to that billing just yet, but more on limitations in a moment.
HTML5 is now supported by most late-model smartphones and tablets.
Web apps written in HTML5 generally lose desktop-and-mouse-oriented
scroll bars and gain mobile device-native pinch, flip, swipe, and
other gesture-based navigation capabilities.
Touch.salesforce.com is little more than a landing page today, but
by early next year it will deliver an HTML5-based version of the
Salesforce.com Sales Cloud application, Clarence So, the company's
senior vice president of strategy, told InformationWeek. The HTML5
app will also support customer and partner customizations of the
Sales Cloud.
Salesforce was not ready to release a roadmap detailing when its
Service Cloud app and Force.com will be rewritten in HTML5,
according to So, but the company made it clear that's the plan.
"Our customers have built over 240,000 custom apps with Force.com,
and with touch.salesforce.com they'll become instantly mobile so
you can access them through mobile devices," said Al Falcione,
Saleforce.com's VP of product marketing.
The embrace of HTML5 does not mean that Salesforce will abandon
device-native mobile apps, So said. The vendor currently supports
Apple iOS and BlackBerry RIM devices with native apps, and it's
expected to support Android with a native app by year end.
Nonetheless, HTML5 is viewed by many as the future of mobile
development. Many Web app developers are supporting both paths for
the time being.
"This is a smart way for Salesforce to be adaptable in the mobile
space, and they were proactive in stating that they don't feel the
choice of tablets and smartphones has settled out just yet," said
Altimeter analyst Chris Silva.
There are currently limits to the device-native capabilities
supported by HTML5. For example, access to the camera functionality
on various mobile devices is usually lacking. To ensure adequate
functionality, Salesforce.com will be releasing supplemental
HTML5-based containers for popular devices that will fill any gaps
in functionality, So said. Writing containers will undoubtedly be
far less onerous for developers than creating complete native
applications for multiple devices and platforms.