Unfortunately he didn't really have any specific examples from some of these cross platform toolkits or SDKs. I've played with Appcelerator/Titanium, and the drawbacks are obvious : no IDE and debugging is painful.
What about some of the others: Airplay, Corona, Cocos2D-X? Has anyone actually tried some of these that could give more insight?
> What about some of the others: Airplay, Corona, Cocos2D-X? Has anyone actually tried some of these that could give more insight?
Toolkits you mention are geared towards cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics, i.e. game development. They do not deal with native controls at all, you have to take care of buttons, menus, touch control etc. yourself. My guess is that Martin Fowler is talking about view-based applications.
That is the approach the firm I interview with on Sunday is using..seems to make sense in that he is covering a large set of use cases from the end customer/client perspective.
- Don't use cross-platform toolkits
- For maximum reach: built a web app that looks like web app
- To appeal to a particular platform: build a native app for that platform, with a experience design based on that platforms interaction style