The Ignition Mobile Module displays Ignition Vision project screens. However, the Mobile Module launches projects in a different way than a normal Vision Client would launch on a standard PC or laptop computer. It has to do this because mobile devices don't run the same version of Java that runs on a standard computer.

To explain how the Mobile Module gets Ignition Vision Clients onto mobile devices, let's first understand the normal launch method. In the standard Ignition Vision launch sequence, you point your computer's web browser to the URL of your Ignition Gateway, which is a web-server. When you click on a launch link, a JNLP file is downloaded to your computer. Your browser knows that Java is the program that handles JNLP files, and launches Java. This is called Java Web Start, and is the technology that powers our web-launched clients.

The Mobile Module uses recent advances in mobile web browser technology to bring the same rich, powerful interface of the Vision Module to your mobile device without requiring Java.

When you point your mobile device's browser to the Ignition Gateway, you're presented with a mobile-optimized version of the Gateway homepage. When you click on a launch link and then log in, a special Vision Client is launched, invisibly, on the Gateway itself. Your mobile web browser then uses Javascript and a technology called AJAX to pull the screen information from the Gateway and displays it using an HTML Canvas. It only needs to grab the screen information from parts of the screen that have changed, making it quite efficient.This is similar to how Remote Desktop works, except that it only displays the contents of an Ignition Vision project.