What would you expect of a mobile development framework?

Question

Hi,

we are planning to build a web based client side application framework. The main focus is to write native looking webapps using Java and compile them for your target platform. Our planned target platforms would be the iPhone and Android (on top of PhoneGap), Backberry and Palm WebOS.

Our goal is to create a decent framework and that's what this post is about. We want to know what developers would expect of such a framework and on what topics are more important than others. We also want to know if it would be more important to provide a UI-framework which really feels like a native app on the target platform (e.g. scrolling behavior) or to provide some decent APIs to use HTML5 and PhoneGap features, store and manipulate data etc.

What would you, as developers, really like to see in that kind of a framework? After all, you're the ones that will (hopefully some day) be using it. And most important: Would you use it?

Answer 1

Um... if it's going to be platform-specific and client side

Our approach is to be as device platform neutral as possible.

As said before: Our goal is to write an application in Java and to compile it then for a specific target platform. It should also be possible to compile the same application without any (or at least as few as possible) changes in your Java-Code for all our supported platforms.

We choose to use "the web" as our runtime because almost all mobile platforms provide some kind of web environment on which we could deploy our apps.

Answer 2

Make the setup and default behaviors of components work right out of the box -- give them either a builder pattern so that the component is ready to be useful in one line, or constructors that contain sufficient amount of parameters to create a well-formed object.

Along these lines, every GUI component should have an adapter to take a variety of model based data structures. Pass it along, no-fuss, no-muss, and absolutely no boxing/unboxing.

Answer 3

I would like a good GWT framework for mobile plateforms (at least iPhone and android), with a native feel UI (ie : smooth scroll, fast click), and UI customization by CSS. I would pay for that !!

Answer 4

the bad thing about the webkit based mobile frameworks is they are not as smooth and fast as other applications. This is where all they stack. I would recommend you to write a JAVA Dalvik framework, which is easy to extend an use with a nice error handling and strong UI. It should definetly have it's own plugin pattern so the community can extend it if you are planning to go open source