Is there a common language for cell phone software development?

Question

Good morning

I would like to enable my customers to read their data on my website through cell phones.

My website is ASP.NET application.

I saw Nokia and Apple has their own SDKs that enables you to accomplish it creating software application.

• Is there a unique language platform I can code my software in order to run it on all cell phone brands? Like java or c++?
• If so, is there a quick start application so I'll be able to start studying it?

thank you

Answer 1

Most feature phones (plain-ol phones, most of the ones you usually see) use J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition). BlackBerry supports this, but also has its own, much more versatile API, which supports many more features than J2ME alone. They are not compatible.

The iPhone uses Objective-C to develop with, and requires an Apple computer to develop. You could also try using Mono-Touch, which I have no experience with, but is basically a port of .NET to the iPhone.

Android devices have their own API which is significantly different from J2ME and BlackBerry devices.

Most current Windows Mobile devices use the Mobile .NET Framework, and also support generic C++ apps. Some of the phones I've seen have Java as well, but I've had no experience developing for that.

Answer 2

If you take the example of iPhone, they don't support flash for various reasons and there are only 2 ways of development - either you use their native SDK which is by no means a universal way or you make essentially an AJAX application - this may also work poorly at other devices with crappy javascript support. As far as I remember from old times working with Windows Mobile the situation was similar there, so I think there is no real universal way of developing for these devices.

Answer 3

most are written in java

Answer 4

If you use the Rhodes framework by Rhomobile, you can write your application once in Ruby, and then deploy to iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian (Nokia) and Android.

You will still have to install all the SDKs for the different phones (which means you pretty much need to use OSX), but you don't have to use them: Rhodes will take care of how to call all the different compilers to generate the different executables.

If you sign up for the RhoHub hosted development service, you don't even need to install anything, you can build apps for all supported phones on RhoHub's build cloud at the push of a button.

Since this is the third time that this exact same question has been asked, you might also want to look at the other two:

• Language for phone software development
• Which platform is used in companies now-a-days to implement mobile applications?