I've been playing around with developing Android apps in Java for a while and am starting to get a handle on it. However if I want to on start on an iOS version I need to code everything from scratch - which is, well, undesirable.
I was wondering on what cross platform solutions there are available and how well they work in practice. I've been thinking about web applications - perhaps using jQuery Mobile or Titanium, or Adobe Flash/Flex/Air. I also don't yet have a Mac, which I'll probably have to invest in.
So my Questions :
What cross-platform development environments exist for iOS / Android (and/or other devices)?
What has your experience been with these tools? (this is what I'm really keen to know)
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There is also BatteryTech which we've been using for the past 18 months and have released several games off of it. http://www.batterypoweredgames.com/batterytech
All C++, Android and iOS support, all users get full source. The new v2 includes lua bindings.
MonoTouch and MonoDroid but what will happen to that part of Attachmate now is anybody's guess. Of course even with the mono solutions you're still creating non cross platform views but the idea being the reuse of business logic.
Keep an eye on http://www.xamarin.com/ it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Cappuccino or PhoneGap.
Sometimes though trying to find a shortcut does not save you time or give you a comparable end product.
My experience with making something very simple in PhoneGap+jQuery Mobile was fine. I was able to do it quickly for iOS. However, it didn't work on my Android phones without making some changes. The project was a very simple app to take pictures and post them to a web site. And at the end of the day it felt "clunky" compared to a true native app.
I don't believe there will ever be easy cross platform development. I think the browser is as close as you will get. By choosing something like PhoneGap I think you are just trading one set of pain points for a different set of pain points.
In case you do not want to use a full-fledged framework for cross-platform development, take a look at C++ as an option. iOS fully supports using C++ for your application logic via Objective-C++. I don't know how well Android's support for C++ via the NDK is suited for doing your business logic in C++ rather than just some performance-critical code snippets, but in case that use case is well supported, you could give it a try.
This approach of course only makes sense if your application logic constitutes the greatest part of your project, as the user interfaces will have to be written individually for each platform.
As a matter of fact, C++ is the single most widely supported programming language (with the exception of C), and is therefore the core language of most large cross-platform applications.
There's also MoSync Mobile SDK
GPL and commercial licensing. There's a good overview of their approach here.
Although I've just begun looking at this area of development, I think it comes down to this basic difference: some tools retain the original code, and some port to native...
for instance, PhoneGap just keeps the HTML/CSS/JS code that you write, and wraps it in sufficient iOS code to qualify as an app, whereas Appcelerator delivers you an XCode project...so if you're not familiar with iOS, then that wouldn't really provide any benefit to you over PhoneGap, but if you DO know a bit, that might give you just a bit more ability to tweak the native versions after your larger coding effort.
I haven't used appcelerator myself, but worked on a project a couple weeks ago where one of our team members made an entire iPad app in about 24 hours using it.
And yes, to actually submit to apple, you'll have to get a mac, but if that's not your primary work platform you can go cheap.
If you've ever used LUA, you might try Corona SDK can create apps that run on IOS and Android
I've downloaded it and messed around some, I find LUA a very easy to learn scripting language without the usual scripting language hassles/limitations....
Source: Stackoverflow.com