Cross Platform Mobile Dev

Kernel32

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with doing cross platform mobile development. By that I mean using a development tool to build applications that can be deployed to Palm, Pocket PC/Windows Mobile, Tablet PC and possibly others. Ideally I want a dev environment where I can deploy the application to a server to be picked up by a device. I also need a synch server, where data can be transfered both ways and the synch server have built in support for server events so I can hook it into the backend systems.

I have found various toolsets AppForge being one but thats just a development tool. They reference a synch server, and I got a price which was steep and it also required "professional services" which means paying $200 a hour for a consultant to scratch his arse. Then there are others like Agentry from Syclo which comes with a synch server but the per device pricing is high in my opinion. The business developers like tools like Agentry though because application development requires zero coding. It's an impressive tool but if you can't code then there is always a brick wall you eventually hit. The synch server piece is important because I really don't want to re-invent the wheel if someone has already done it. I just downloaded SQL Anywhere Studio from Sysbase. It has an interesting product. Adapative Server Anywhere on the server and Ultralite on the device using Mobilink to talk to each other. Does anyone have any experience with SQL Anywhere or with anything I have mentioned?

stevenmu

I looked into this a bit before and it's an area filled with compromises. Java is the only platform at the moment (I think) that'll let you write one application to run on all the mentioned platforms but there isn't a free JVM available for the microsoft platforms. Because of the legal wranglings between microsoft and sun, neither one would produce one. IBM have one as part of their Java development stuff. A .Net CompactFramework app would run on all the microsoft platforms but not Palm and probably not symbian, altough I think Mono may let it run on linux based handhelds.

If you could require that a device be connected to run the app, the best way may be to develop a web application targetted at mobile devices. Most devices will have a web browser and be able to connect to your network via wi-fi, dial-up, VPN etc. A huge benefit of this is that all your code and data sits on one central server without needing to deploy or synch anything on the devices. And you can base it on whatever tech you're happiest with, visual studio, and presumably some of the java kits, comes with tools to help with targetting mobile devices when creating a web app but I'm sure any normal web app would work once you bear the resolution limitations in mind.

aidan_walsh

stevenmu wrote:

Java is the only platform at the moment (I think) that'll let you write one application to run on all the mentioned platforms

Paritally true. The real truth is that (practically) no two vendors versions of the interpreters are identical, so you always end up having to create different tradeoff versions with minor differences for the different platforms. Hence, you may have to create a different version for Motorolla devices, and another for Nokia, another for Siemens, et cetera.