by Guillaume Aubert for
With the emergence of mobile platforms such as IOS and Android, building Applications (Apps) has again been trendy for the last three to five years within the developers’ community. The birth of Apps stores for traditional platforms such as Mac OS X, Windows 8 and Ubuntu also favors a re-birth of cross-plateform desktop applications development. Gmvault is a standalone open-source application allowing users to backup and restore their Gmail mailbox (www.gmvault.org). Within this talk, the Gmvault creator will detail based on his experience, why he thinks that the Python platform is a mature candidate to be used for developing cross-platform applications. He will detail the strengths of Python, to develop multi-platform applications in addition to its intrinsic qualities, like: the abstraction of Python OS oriented libraries (os, file) making Python agnostic of the hosting platform, the capacity to interface with any c/c++ library, the dedicated OS system APIs (win32, registry, …) to deal with OS specificities. He will also go through the current Python weaknesses when one wants to develop multi-platform applications like the complete lack of mature and well maintained desktop packaging and deployment libraries for Windows and Mac OS X, the limited number of available multi-platform GUI toolkits or the lack of libraries interfacing with the different OS scheduling or notification features. He will finally share his experience on building an open-source application and especially what the developer will get out of this journey if he is brave enough to embark on this adventure.
Some people consider phonegap to be a slow tool, but I think it totally depends on the developer and the language. You can seamlessly generate apps for different mobile platforms using one single code base. This tool is quite easy to use. Future lies in the hands of cross platform app development. Businesses do not want to spend much on individual applications when they have better options to choose from.