A Really Simple SDK
So I have finally gotten past all of the hurdles of making an iPhone version of my thesis software called Friend Forecaster. Well, let me be honest, I didn’t write an iPhone app in fact I wrote a lot of Ruby and HTML to make this happen. I used the most basic API and I think the powerful one… I used the web.
It’s not a new idea to think of the web as a platform or as an SDK… just look at where Chrome is going and you will see that the browser and the web are the future platforms. The great thing about this is that for people like me who love making websites, I have intemate knoweldge of the basic API languages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Knowing a backend language is essential in today’s dynamic world so I have learned a handful of those too. However, there is the little problem of the interface.
The interface is not something to be overlooked since it is the gateway and gatekeeper to your app. The last time I checked there were a lot of browers. Of these browsers, here are the ones I care about: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE7+. This is what scares people away from the web. The fact that you have no guarentee that what you make will look the same or behave the same for all of your users.
This will have to change… and it already has. IE has a lot of catching up to do and webmasters are punishing them for not being standards compliant. Should this punishment continue, they will have no choice to make a better browser.
So what’s my point… learn how to make websites! learn the old fashion way and the modern way. Get to know the web and get to know it’s limitations. With frameworks like Rails, JavaFx, Django and the dark horse Cappuccino there is lots to learn and lots to explore.
Here’s to a web based API!
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