Is it possible to develop an application for the iMac that is portable to the iPad?

Question

Are the development environments the same? Does iPad support Java development? Any insight would be helpful.

Answer 1

The iPad only supports C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript. It's in the developer agreement. Also, on the iPad you will probably be using the cocoa touch framework which is different from the cocoa interface on Macs.

Answer 2

You can use Apple's XCode IDE to develop applications for both Mac OS X and the iOS platforms. I do not have a Mac, so I cannot give you much more insight as to if there are any differences when coding for one device or another, though I would imagine an app could be made fairly portable.

Unfortunately, Java is not supported on the iPad, and probably never will. The reasoning is the same as the reasoning Apple decided not to include Flash.

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

You can use XCode/Objective-C for both, but at least the user interface code would be completely different. You may be able to share some backend code and libraries.

Java is not supported on the iPad. You are down to C/C++/Objective-C and JavaScript.

Answer 4

For developing for iMac and iPad you can use Xcode for both. The project types will differ though.

I wouldn't worry about Java if you are working on the Apple platforms. Use Objective-C instead.

For Mac desktop you'll typically use the NSFoundation and the Cocoa frameworks. For the mobile devices you'll use the NSFoundation and UIKit frameworks. Notice that basic data types reuse the same framework (NSFoundation) but the frameworks for the GUIs are different. What this means is that you can create common code if you are only using NSFoundation. But you won't be able to use the same code for working with GUIs. This makes sense as the way GUIs work for desktop and mobile are very different.