Development tools for Multi platforms App

The last six months, I have been very busy working on an online banking mobile app for a Canadian bank, leaving me zero time to keep up with the blogging.  The major lesson I learned from this banking project, is that the number ONE challenge for developing an enterprise mobile app; is the very fragmented device platforms (says iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows ...) in the market that a Mobile App wants to target.  It is close to impossible (cost and time wise) for a company to develop native application for all platforms. 

Couple tool vendors come to the solution offering a write-once deploy-in-many, most of them are based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript which basically provides an embedded Web application but has very limited or none native API support.

The tool we used in the banking project is KONY Studio from KONY, the tool supports building the app to multiple platforms on web or/and native modes on a single code base.  Unfortunately, the vendor doesn't provide free developer (or trial) version.

Recently I found the IBM Worklight mobile platforms,  this tool also bases on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript but it is integrated with Apache Cordova to facilitate building Hybrid App (access native API).  One of the coolest thing I like about this tool is it's built in device emulators that you don't need to use the platform SDK (e.g. XCode for iOS) to program  (i.e. only to certain extent; as you still need to deploy it to a SDK emulator for testing at the end).  IBM offers developer version for download.

In the coming blogs, I will blog on topics of multi platforms mobile app development and "enterprising mobile app".  Stay tune...