What do you expect from a mobile development platform?

Question

we plan to create a client-side web application platform. The focus is on writing your own web applications using Java and compiling them for the target platform. Our planned target platforms will be iPhone and Android (on top of PhoneGap), Backberry and Palm WebOS.

Our goal is to create a decent foundation and what we are talking about. We want to know what developers would expect from such a structure and from which are more important than others. We also want to know if it would be more important to provide an interface structure that really looks like a native application on the target platform (for example, scrolling behavior) or provide some decent APIs for using HTML5 and PhoneGap functions, data storage and processing, etc.

What would you, as developers, really want to see in such a structure? In the end, you will be the one who will (hopefully someday) use it. And most importantly: would you use it?

Answer 1

I need a good GWT framework for mobile plates (at least iPhone and Android), with its own user interface (i.e. smooth scrolling, quick click) and customizing the user interface using CSS. I would pay for it !!

Answer 2

Make the settings and default behavior of the components work right out of the box - give them either a builder template so that the component is ready for use on one line, or constructors that contain enough parameters to create a well-shaped object.

Along these lines, each GUI component must have an adapter in order to use different model-based data structures. Skip it, don’t fuss, no-mousse and don’t box / unpack at all.

Answer 3

The bad thing about webkit-based mobile frameworks is not as smooth and fast as other applications. That's where they all add up. I would recommend you write a JAVA Dalvik framework that easily extends usage with good error handling and a strong interface. It should definitely have its own plugin template so the community can expand it if you plan to upgrade to open source

Answer 4

My personal favorite would be something that would allow me to develop using Widget Standard http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/ , and then publish in application stores, wrapping the widget in a web view or the like. Opera Mobile, Samsung Bada, Symbian and Android now support the platform. http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/12/22/

This will include a basic JS framework, which can be Closure Compiled less, using only the methods / parts of the framework I use to maintain a minimum size.

Answer 5

Um ... if it is a platform and a client side

Our approach should be as neutral as possible for the platform platform.

As already mentioned: our goal is to write a Java application and compile it for a specific target platform. It should also be possible to compile the same application without any (or at least as little as possible) changes in your Java code for all supported platforms.

We use the Internet as our runtime, because almost all mobile platforms provide some kind of web environment on which we can deploy our applications.