These Days Labs

Barriers to mobile app development are getting so low they are almost non-existent. As web developers today we have no excuse not be creating for mobile. We don’t need to wait for Flash CS5. The tools to create rich, responsive mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Nokia are already available with HTML5. If we have to deploy a native app there are open source tools available to convert web standards like HTML and JavaScript into native iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm and Nokia applications.

There are a number of advantages to developing with HTML5 instead of writing native Objective C applications for iPhone. You have probably already heard these:

• Developing with web technology is much faster than with Objective C,
• Bug fixes and updates can be deployed instantly,
• We can utilize our existing HTML, CSS & JavaScript talent.

But what you might not have realised is:

• HTML5 allows us to store data on the device with SQLite and run apps offline,
• Web apps can interface device features such as geo location, accelerometer and multi-touch input,
• Web apps can offer a responsive and seamless user experience. You can use a JQuery plugin to create native iPhone animations like flip, slide and dissolve. Web apps do not have to look and feel like a website.

Of course there are still differences between the various mobile devices, but with a bit of tweaking the same HTML5 app can be made to run on iPhone, Android, Palm and Nokia devices because they all use the Webkit browser engine.

Sometimes we might need to generate native applications, to sell the application in Apple’s App Store for example. But even that doesn’t mean we have to resort to Objective C or Java. There is a clever open source tool called Appcelerator Titanium which deploys native applications to iPhone and Android – and we can code them in standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course deploying as native apps removes some of the benefits inherent to web apps – such as rapid deployment and development iteration. But this approach still dramatically reduces barriers to development. Phone Gap is another open source tool for deploying native mobile applications from standard web technologies. Unlike Appcelerator, Phone Gap supports Blackberry, Palm and Nokia as well as iPhone and Android. However it doesn’t offer as rich of a feature set as Appcelerator. Rhomobile offers yet another framework, but it is targeted towards Ruby developers.

So when you next have an idea for a mobile app, don’t give up on it because you don’t know Objective C or Java, or because it is too difficult to create a cross-platform app. Put your existing HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills to use and take advantage of HTML5 or an open source web-to-native compiler. I will have a play around with Appcelerator and Phone Gap and post my findings on this blog.

Comparison of mobile application development methods