søndag den 10. oktober 2010

Bridging the platform gap

Earlier i wrote an article about the negative statistics in the mobile industry. There are however technologies you can use to improve your chance to succeed. This technology basically allows you to shoot shotgun shells towards all platforms at the same time and hopefully achieve what seems impossible on just one.

One such technology is the brainchild of the Nitobi development team. Nitobi has created a framework called PhoneGap, which as the name implies bridges the gap between the phones. PhoneGap does this by creating a new layer between your application and the development API on your platform of choice. This means that when you request the GPS coordinates of the device, your application requests this in the PhoneGap layer, which then depending on the platform knows exactly how to get this information for you.

Before i go more in dept on how you actually achieve this check out this video from the phonegap team:
To develop mobile applications using PhoneGap you use regular HTML and Javascript. The idea behind this is that there are a lot more Web Developers and people who know JavaScript than there are developers who know Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android), and a whole lot more than developers who know both Java and Objective-C.

Once setup you, through only JavaScript, will have pretty much all the same tools at your disposal that you would normally, and while JavaScript isn't exactly the nicest programming language in the world, it is a lot more accessible than Objective-C for most developers.

PhoneGap is not a "Next-Next Installer", it does require a fair bit of setting up to get it running. Once that is done you still have to set up the build environment for each of the platforms you intend to release onto. This also means a Mac is still required to build iOS apps, even with PhoneGap. It is still a huge leap forward from what seemed to be history repeating itself once again. I am glad we are not forced into choosing and betting on just one platform. A repeat of the platform wars back in the early days of computers might still be avoided. Avoided by using JavaScript, now who would have guessed that.

1 kommentar:

  1. I will publish a more detailed description on how you get PhoneGap up and running for Android development, soonish.

    SvarSlet