Table of Contents
- Summary
- Defining the mobile beast
- User expectations trump developer benefits
- Questions to ask before you start
- Four paths to a cross-platform app
- Mobile-styled website
- Hybrid apps
- Cross-compiled native apps
- MBaas and remote services
- Organizational concerns
- Key takeaways
- About Rich Morrow
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Development tools and methodologies for cross-platform mobile applications have been with us for many years, and they now claim some astounding benefits: five to ten times faster development; usage of familiar languages like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS; and development and maintenance of a single codebase.
Today’s developers now have several choices to assist with cross-platform design, ranging from options of application type, supported languages, toolkits, and delegation of logic to scalable, remote backends. Each of these comes with a set of trade-offs, and the speed with which they evolve requires examination of where each will be headed in the future.
In this report, we explore and expand on the following:
- The four avenues through which mobile cross-platform development can be achieved (mobile-styled web app, hybrid app, cross-compiled app, and MBaaS), along with the limitations, benefits, and use cases for each.
- The strict limitations of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS applications and the specific use cases and applications for which the approach may be valid.
- The tremendous upside of solutions like Xamarin and Appcelerator, which enable developers to write code in one language and cross-compile down to native code on mobile devices.
- The fairly recent trend in offloading client-side business logic to MBaaS and remote service solutions and where this approach does and does not make sense.
- Organizational and structural challenges encountered by web and desktop development teams and how managers can best overcome those challenges.
(Feature image courtesy Flickr userphilcampbell)