Session Presented at 1st IndicThreads.com Conference On Mobile Application Development held on 19-20 November 2010 in Pune, India WEB: http://M10.IndicThreads.com ------------ Speaker: Rohit Nayak Abstract: Mobile development is still in a nascent stage. New platforms keep emerging and old ones regularly undergo major changes. To confuse matters further there are several cross-platform tools each claiming to use a single codebase to target multiple phones. What is a developer to do? In this talk we will look at some of the key cross-platform mobile platforms out there including Appcelarator Titanium, PhoneGap and MoSync. We will start out by reviewing the different mobile platforms and development environments before reviewing the landscape of cross-platform tools. We will discuss the different design approaches used by these platforms to support their target smart-phones. Quick demos using a few of these platforms will be shown so that the audience will get a flavor of the low level coding details as well as supporting tools like IDEs and simulators provided. Java and QT are traditional cross-platform environments which have a place in mobile development as well. We will take a quick look at support available for these on mobile platforms. Finally we compare the different approaches in terms of functional limitations, programming complexity, deployment and lock-in. Takeaways from the session Review of the mobile single platform and cross platform landscape Should I look at cross-platform development or not? Which cross-platform tools make sense for me? What kind of developers do I need for cross-platform development? WEB: http://M10.IndicThreads.com

1. 1
Cross-platform mobile
development
choices and limitations
Rohit Nayak
Talentica

2. 2
The mobile market
How Mobile apps differ
Native app landscape
Cross-platform approaches
Closer look at Titanium, PhoneGap
Other options
Summary
Agenda

3. 3

4. 4
Last Gartner report

5. 5

6. 6

7. 7
Always Available
Alternative Inputs
 Tap/Flick/Rotate/Pinch/Shake
Location
Accelerometer
Local Storage
Orientation
Camera/Contacts/Phone/SMS
How Mobile Differs: Features

8. 8
Interruptions
Screen Size
Speed
Memory
Keyboard
Battery Charge
GPS, CPU tick, memory refresh, display
How Mobile Differs: Limitations

9. 9
Criteria for comparison
Smartphones
Social Network / Enterprise Clients
Standard skillset
US market
iPhone / Android / Blackberry
Cool factor

10. 10
Cross-platform Apps
Native Apps
Cross-compiled Native Apps
Packaged native browser control based
Hand-crafted browser control based
Web application

11. 11
Dev Env Distribution Strengths Weaknesses
iPhone Mac/Objective C AppStore, iTunes Uniform experience
Tight Control, learning
curve, need a Mac
Android Any/Java
Android Market,
Web
Open, Multi-vendor
Non-uniform
experience, Version
incompatibility, Chaos?!
Blackberry Any/Java App Market Enterprise, Security Support
Symbian Any/QT (C++) Ovi store Market reach
Support, C++!, New
platform
Windows
Mobile
Windows/.Net MS Store Microsoft Dev community Very new, closed
Native Apps

12. 12
iPhone Development
Mac-only, Objective-C
XCode graphical IDE
iPhone simulator
Interface (UI) builder

13. 13
Objective-C
Object-oriented extensions to C
Message passing
Interface (UI) builder
No GC on iPhone
Custom URLs (tel://, sms://)

14. 14
Cross-compiled Native Apps
Rhomobile
Titanium by Appcelerator
MoSync

15. 15
Titanium
HTML/JS/Ajax
Titanium Developer
iPhone / Android / Blackberry
Demo

16. 16
Installing Titanium
Install Java 1.6, Android (1.6-2.2)
Download/install Titanium
Install KitchenSink reference app
Create new project
Test on simulator
Test on device

17. 17
Titanium Internals
Converts JS to Symbols
Native compiler
Android: .class, javac
iPhone: .o, gcc
Translates HTML to native view elements
Plugin architecture

18. 18
Titanium - Device APIs
 Location
Accelerometer
Contacts
Device Orientation
Camera
Storage

19. 19
Titanium - Issues
Complex tool
Keeping pace: iPhone 4.0
Device support
iPhone bias
Doesn’t work as advertised

20. 20
Rhomobile
Supports max devices
Native apps, MVC
Controllers in Ruby, byte code
interpreted on device
Views (HTML/CSS)
Views rendered in embedded browser
Some UI elements (Tabs/Menu) native

21. 21
Rhomobile Architecture

22. 22
MoSync
Build toolkit with SDK,
Most platforms (Blackberry WIP)
C/C++ (Eclipse)
Device specific run times

23. 23
Packaged (native browser control)
Phonegap
Rhomobile UI

24. 24
PhoneGap
HTML/JS/Ajax
Eclipse Based dev env
Device specific libraries
Javascript extensions
Demo

25. 25
PhoneGap Internals
iPhone App Flow
Javascript queue/marshalling
UIWebView integration
Extending PhoneGap

26. 26
Mobile Web Applications
HTML5!
Mobile Safari
jQTouch
Storage
localStorage, sessionStorage, sql database

27. 27
To Conclude
Native Apps
PhoneGap
Web Applications