Some years ago I dipped my foot in the water of developing WML websites and J2ME apps - and found it a rather unpleasant experience.
Hearing stories about developers making $$$ in their free time, writing trivial apps for iphone and android, and having a (top secret - don't tell anybody) idea for an app that everyone will immediately rush out and buy, I thought I'd have a look at the current state of play regarding development tools - however while there are no end of people pushing branded products, its often unclear what the programming language is like and what integration it provides with mobile devices.
I could develop most of the functionality as an online website - but for reasons of confidentiality and the ridiculous cost and low speed of mobile internet connections, it makes a lot of sense to deploy most of the functionality client-side.
Google gears like the ideal tool for implementing this - but Google have pulled the plug on the project.
The reasons I liked GG were:
- html rendering (there will be a lot of content in the app)
- a standard programming language (javascript)
- integration with geolocation
If it had supported the accelerometer and bluetooth it would have been perfect!
Looking around at other approaches, I see that standard Android apps are developed using Java. While I'm not a big fan of the language, I could stretch a point in this case - but what about all the content rendering? Is there an off-the-shelf html renderer for android which I could then build my own handler for?
(if you're getting the impression that I'm something of a programming snob - you're probably right)
I had a quick look at Appcelerator - which has lots of pages telling me how wonderful it is - but I've yet to see any details of how it works, what the language looks like, how it integrates with hardware on the client, how to produced a packaged app for resale....
Any suggestions for a suitable toolkit/platform?
TIA
