NewsOpen Source Tools Help Solve Mobile Application Development Dilemma

Open Source Tools Help Solve Mobile Application Development Dilemma

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InfoWorld’s Savio Rodrigues has an interesting column today about how open source mobile application development frameworks are solving the mobile software dilemma.

The problem is that there are too many mobile operating systems for any one company to be able to write native applications for all of them, Rodrigues said.

One solution is to build mobile applications using open Web standards such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. But as Rodrigues points out, doing so means losing access to the individual phone’s unique components like GPS or the accelerometer.

That’s where open source comes into play.

Rodrigues said that by leveraging the power of open source frameworks such as PhoneGap, Rhomobile and Appcelerator – mobile application developers can build software that can access the phone’s unique features, and hit many more phones, without having to build many native applications for each one.

“There are obviously considerations about application lock-in to the framework itself versus building against open Web standards,” Rodrigues said. “If this is a concern for your business, ensure that the open source license and the community around the open source framework meets your requirements for flexibility and future freedom of action.”

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