[OT] 13 essential programming tools for the mobile Web | Mobile Technology - InfoWorld

Keith Clarke keith.clarke at clarkeandclarke.co.uk
Tue Jun 14 03:30:20 EDT 2011


One might argue that it is actually RunRev that is missing something strategic here - the potential and impact of HTML5. 

When I invested in Revolution a year ago, things were looking very promising for its potential for true cross-platform application development. RunRev had just announced the revServer prerelease, there was talk of a new revWeb player and Apple had just shown it's true imperial colours by restricting cross-platform compilers - for RunRev, a painful lesson on aligning one's business strategy with a larger partner's proprietary technology strategy. 

Android was still a future and major cloud developers started ramping-up their investment in HTML5/CSS3 to mitigate the coming plethora of mobile platform variants. At that time, RunRev could have adopted a brave, cross-platform, 'thinner-client' strategy by pushing HTML5 capabilities in the revWeb player and revServer, but Apple changed just enough to allow RunRev to stay in its comfort zone.

A year later and, after many developer-years effort burned by RunRev, what has been delivered for those investing in the product(?) - two new OS ports - but what of the bigger picture? LiveCode remains fundamentally a thick-client on 'some-OS' development environment - not cross-platform' in a 2011 sense of the word. Over the last year, Linux has been largely ignored, the revWeb player has been completely ignored and those investing in the revServer prerelease programme have the right to be quite miffed; having received no ROI.

Meanwhile, HTML5 is getting ever-closer and it looks very much like RunRev and LiveCode won't be players in that world. I hope that it doesn't prove for me, a painful lesson on aligning one's business strategy with a larger partner's proprietary technology strategy.
Best,
Keith..
  
On 13 Jun 2011, at 23:28, Paul Foraker wrote:

> http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/13-essential-programming-tools-the-mobile-web-246
> 
> *When it comes to programming for mobile devices, choice quickly becomes
> dilemma. Do you target the lucrative iPhone market at the expense of
> Android's rising tide? Do you go native or write code to the mobile Web? And
> while a single stack of code that performs optimally on an increasingly wide
> array of platforms, form factors, and devices would be the dream, the
> reality is a fragmented trial in which rudimentary tasks can often be a
> challenge.
> 
> *I'm thinking maybe the author missed something.
> 
> -- Paul





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