Programming the Mobile Web

Chapter 13. Testing, Debugging, and Performance

Testing, debugging, and performance optimization are the three scariest activities in the mobile web development world, but don’t worry. There are lots of ways to tame them.

Testing and Debugging

In Chapter 4, we talked about emulators and simulators and how can they help us to see how our websites will be rendered on real devices. These tools are very useful and provide a simple, fast, and fairly accurate testing solution. If it doesn’t work in the emulator, it probably will not work on the real device, and if it works in the emulator, it probably will work on the real device (probably, again probably!).

There are some problems with this testing approach, though. For one thing, there are hundreds of differences between real devices, and hundreds of bugs. Furthermore, there are several platforms without emulation. That is why real device testing is mandatory.

But how can we get access to multiple real devices? Here are a few suggestions:

• Acquire as many friends as you can (with different devices, if possible).

• Buy or rent devices. Some vendors offer promotions for buying or renting devices for developers and their partners.

• Use a testing house company. This is an expensive solution and not recommended for mobile web developers; we need to be as close as possible to the devices.

Note

Mob4Hire (http://www.mob4hire.com) is a mobile social network aimed at joining testers with mobile devices around the world and developers who want to test applications ...