- Lightswitch by Gjuro Kladarić, FFZG
- Hybrid Mobile Applications by Matija Šmalcelj, Pet minuta
What I was looking for is more Lightswitch education. I just started some Silverlight development my self and the idea of Lightswitch intrigued me. There are a lot of applications being developed in pure code today which could just easily be developed by a Lightswitch-like tool.
In my opinion developers tend to be to high horse about development practices and techniques. The majority thinks if something wasn't developed in pure code, using the hottest techniques and frameworks its something to keep quiet at leat or at worst to be ashamed of.
Latter experience taught me some lessons. For the majority of LOB applications nobody really cares how we do it except us. Now, I'm of the opinion that we should care how we do what we do. But I also think that we can do a good job by not being such asses about the way we do things regularly. For somethings there is no need for unit tests, for somethings database design is just enough. Not to mention that not everything needs to be a three layer architecture and that some forms with code behind and a data store are the proper solution for some LOB applications.
The Lightswitch presentation was purposefully short. It reminded me about Microsoft Access and my faith in the tool just sunk. It seems it wasn't really what I hoped it would be. The presenter repeatedly pointed out that this tools isn't for the regular developer but for fairly advanced administration personel. Ok. I can achieve more with Drupal, CCK and Views.
The second presentation, about Hybrid Mobile Applications was really interesting. The presenter works in a company specialized in social networks and mobile applications and he illustrated the business case for developing Hybrid Mobile Applications, e.g. web applications written for webKit and run inside a native wrapper in order to give an illusion of a native iPhone or Android app.
Whats the deal here? If you want to write a cross platform mobile app you need to write a separate implementation for each platform. One in objective-c for iPhone, one in Java for Android and so on. With Hybrid Mobile applications you just write (or take an open source one) native wrapper e.g. an application that internatlly starts the browser as a control and that resizes its self that all browser specific features are hidden from the screen thus leaving the page content. The real application is written using webkits HTML5 capabilities CSS3 animations, Javascript local storage, geolocation etc.
The application runs inside a single html page and the entire source code is shipped as single build with the wrapper thus by just changing the wrapper one can ship the same code on any native mobile application. The best thing is that the user doesn't know he is using a web application.
The most important thing is to develop the application with no connectivity in mind, which is really easy by the existence of the local storage api that gives to the developer a full fledged relational database to use.
The development is really cheap also. The developer needs a webkit browser (Google Chrome or Safari) an IDE (Eclipse comes to mind) and a couple of mobile frameworks to ease the development effort.
Here are a couple of links given by the presenter:
- http://jqtouch.com/
- http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/
- http://jquerymobile.com/
- http://cubiq.org/iscroll
- http://code.google.com/p/geo-location-javascript/
- http://www.phonegap.com/
- http://www.appcelerator.com/
- A mobile Mantis Bug Tracker interface
- Hmm thats all just one ... :(
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