This is a follow-up for Choosing mobile dev platform/framework and looks closer at the second step -
Identify critical functions, you don't want to implement yourself.
You need to identify which functionality you don't want to implement yourself, in order to figure out what framework to start with.
This is most likely core functionality of a framework or third party libraries for the framework. I prefer core functions over third party libraries, as you never know when a third party library might stop supporting newer versions of the framework or newer platforms. (Well, to be honest, you newer know this for a framework either, but is usually a risk worth taking.)
What are critical functions you don't want to implement? I mean functions that you shouldn't need to go into native code on each platform supported by the framework. For instance if you do want sound in your application, that is most likely a critical function.
From the list from step 1 I had three functions that the framework needed. As the application I'm working on is a bit larger, and I do want to "future-proof" myself, I expanded the list a bit to the same as in the original post.
- Drag and Drop
- Basic access to camera
- HTTP(S) request support
- JSON support
- Custom user interface elements (Must be possible)
- Custom user interface placement (Must be possible)
- Audio playback (simple)
Why I don't want to implement these functions myself?
Let me go through each function:
Drag and Drop: I've done drag and drop before Qt natively supported it, and it was a hassle. I've done drag and drop on the web before there was a properly cross-browser drag and drop javascript library. It wasn't worth the workload.
Basic access to camera: It will be diffcult and timeconsuming to make sure you are up to date on all platforms/devices for this one.
HTTP(S) request support: It's not that difficult to implement if the platform supports tcp sockets, but it's better if it's supported directly.
JSON support: There are tons of libraries for json, so that should be fairly simple to implement yourself, but since there are that many json libs, it's likely that one or another is built into the framework. It's easier and better to choose a framework that already has it.
Custom user interface elements and placement: I do need a bit more than push buttons and text fields. Who doesn't? There are enough text-box-push-button-radio-button apps out there. However for this step it's important to figure out how to implement it. Does it require OpenGL, are there core graphics functions for custom UI elements? Do you use HTML/CSS? How is the performance?
Audio playback: Should be fairly simple to playback a mp3/wav or similar file on the given platform. For this project it's non-critical when looking at latency, but I know already that if latency is critical, Android is currently not possible, however, I know that Google has this on their roadmap, so maybe later.
This raised a few questions for each functionality, which will be addressed when digging into each framework.
