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Robin is an innovator and entrepreneur. 1st prize winner in the Calling All Innovators competition 2009 in the Internet Innovation category for TechBuzz widget which Robin wrote. He co-founded Mippin.com (then called Mobizines) in 2004 which won Forum Nokia developer of the year for 2006/7. He founded a new startup, Alibro Ltd in Oct 2009, as a vehicle to further EyeMags.com
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Robin Jewsbury's Forum Nokia Blog
Dawn of a new age for software development for phone applications
robin.jewsbury | 19 July, 2009 13:26
This week Palm has finally released their SDK for Palm Pre development and Google have continued in their announcements that web technologies will be the eventual approach for mobile phone development. Nokia's WRT technology is now well established and grown signficantly with S60 Ed5 services APIs. Meanwhile the real issue with this technology has been the speed of execution of Javascript is being solved using better Javascript engines and the emergence of new HTML5 functions allows browsers to get closer to native speed execution.
The common approach of all these methods is to use HTML, CSS and Javascript as the basis for writing applications. Each manufactirer is enhancing their Javascript libraries to so that there is API access to system functionalities such as media, sensors, GPS, address book and other core phone functions. Where some manufacturers have not opened up their APIs yet (eg Apple) other group are providing frameworks to do so (eg Phonegap providing plaform access for iPhone and Android).
Additionally W3C have their own widget development metholdolgy which is being supported by a number of operators via the jil.org. Ths technology is very close to WRT and indeed they provide very good tools to convert between WRT and the W3C format.
My own view is there is now a need for someone to create a framework sitting on top of all these technologies - they are all amost the same/compatible with slightly different wrappers and different syntax for the APIs. The real need for all developers is to write their applications only once for all platforms - a framework can take away these diferences.
My own experience of working with these technologies is to develop using Nokia's WRT to create working applications. I then use Phonegap to create the same applications running the same code on iPhone. Its not as easy as it should be - there are all sorts of gotyas, for example scrolling is done differently on iPhone and Android to how normal browsers work, but it can be done and its the future for a new way of doing software development.
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P.S. Original source
Sorcery-ltd | 22/07/2009, 20:16
http://infoworld.com/d/mobilize/iphone-app-store-roulette-tale-rejection-773?page=0,0&source=rss_infoworld_top_stories_
but...
robin.jewsbury | 05/08/2009, 14:47
Apple always give very little information with the reason for rejecting an application and this has often led to people making the conclusions for the rejection - and then this has resulted in misinformation being spread around. PhoneGap apps are not being rejected at all I can assure you - we had our latest accepted last week. You do have to follow the recommendations of phonegap and produce a quality application which follows Apple's UI guidelines. It's as simple as that and you are right Apple have been very inconistent in their rejections at times.
I mostly agree with your general theme, but...
Sorcery-ltd | 22/07/2009, 20:14
Undoubtedly standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the new way to build mobile UIs quickly. Possibly only really OK for whole apps if they're pretty simple. For the more complex stuff, it's still likely the primary UI mechanism unless you want some really fancy OpenGL style UI - but you'll want a proper hybrid app, i.e. Qt WebKit hybrid.
However, this is the second time you've mentioned PhoneGap for iPhone recently and last time Jouni pulled you up on it. I must do so again. Particularly quoting this from a developer blog this week:
"The latest twist is that my application is again rejected (a few weeks after it was approved) because PhoneGap is now officially forbidden. There is hope, though, because Apple says it is in communication with the PhoneGap organizers at Nitobi. When I checked with the folks at Nitobi, they told me that PhoneGap is 100 percent in compliance and they're working on educating Apple. But Apple has told them little except to pay attention to the rules."
Note "PhoneGap is now officially forbidden". The apps that slip through the net are the exception not the rule and people have been using scripts to change symbol names and hide the fact that they're using PhoneGap. So anyone following this strategy at the moment is on dangerous ground.