Chapter 1

Understanding Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development

This book is about mobile application development; more specifically, about easing the pain of mobile application development. There are many smartphone platforms on the market: Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, the Windows 7 Phone, and WebOS. Newer platforms are on the rise as well, such as Samsung’s Bada and Meego.

The sheer number of development platforms for mobile applications may seem overwhelming. This is the first of many points you must keep in mind when dealing with mobile application development.

In the year 2000, we saw a similar situation in the desktop world. We had Microsoft Windows, Apple’s Mac, and various versions of Linux and UNIX. At that time, it was difficult to build products that would run on all these platforms. The resulting fragmentation was often solved via in-house solutions by building frameworks in C++, with Operating System (OS)-specific modules abstracted. Fortunately, Sun’s Java came to the rescue and provided us with a common platform on which to build. With Java’s build–once–and–run–anywhere strategy, building desktop products had become a breeze.