What work has been done on cross-platform mobile development?

iphone android blackberry mobile webos
Nicholas picture Nicholas · Sep 9, 2008 · Viewed 20k times · Source

Have any well-documented or open source projects targeted iPhone, Blackberry, and Android ? Are there other platforms which are better-suited to such an endeavor ? Note that I am particularly asking about client-side software, not web apps, though any information about the difficulties of using web apps across multiple mobile platforms is also interesting.

Answer

Dave Kirby picture Dave Kirby · Aug 10, 2010

The HTML5 standard has support for releasing stand-alone HTML5 apps. Essentially a HTML5 app is a bundle of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS files that will run stand-alone in the browser of the desktop or device. You can distribute them like any other program, including selling them on the iStore for the iPhone.

The support for this is patchy at the moment but is likely to improve tremendously in the next year or two.

Google for HTML5 apps for information and resources. A good introduction to HTML5 is the online book "Dive Into HTML5" by Mark Pilgrim. This is a work in progress, but sufficiently complete to be useful.

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