Write once, run anywhere was the goal of Java, and works pretty well in many scenarios. We have once again moved far away from that open concept, a key player once again being Apple. Our two most popular smart phone systems are programmed in completely separate languages making code transportability less likely. You can write your code to work on the Android or IOS platform Even the coding languages are different with Java or Objective C.
This is a problem that we have faced before. We had differences with GUI platforms in the Thick Client days. You might want to write an application capable of operating in Windows, Unix or the Macintosh, while maintaining a single code base. This was possible to do writing your program in C and using a library specific to each platform at compile time to make it work on the target platform.
I was looking today to see if something similar had been created for the current smart phones. I found a couple efforts that essentially translate code that works on the Android platform into code that works in IOS. This approach makes sense in that the actual language used to program for each platform is different, and you can’t simply replace an interface with the appropriate library for a specified platform.
For those of you writing android or IOS apps, are you simply focusing on a single platform, do you try to port your code from one platform to the other, or do you maintain two distinctly different code bases? Share your experience here online, or drop me an email at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben