cross platform application development

Question

I have created an application in c language and its executable file works fine in windows machine. Now i want that this application should work in other platforms like linux,mac and also on mobile OSs (iphone,androide,blackberry,symbian,etc..).

I don't want to recode it whole again for all these platforms.

I had found flex as alternative as it works on browser so it is platform independent but i am not finding the way of managing video encoding and such kind of things through actionscript 3. It says that some stuffs we can achieve through Native Processes but then it will not true cross platform.

I want my application run on all available platforms with minimal effort to write code again.

e.g. Write code once for all.

What Is the way to achieve this ? I had seen many applications running on different platforms does they have done re-coding for every platform ?

I had heard that there is a software that converts code in different languages. If anyone knows about it, it will also helpful to me.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I believe the only sensible answer here is to use some kind of a web application as HTML is relatively the most universal/cross platform-friendly presentation method.

What I would do is I would create a front end first (let's say using ASP .NET) which would look similar on all platforms you're interested in, then I would compile your c code to a dll and just hook up this dll to your front end exposing its selected functions. Alternatively you can use that dll to create a web service exposing desired functions of your code.

I've seen a few such 100% cross platform applications and to be honest none of them was something more than just decent. I believe the whole effort you're going to put in making your app really platform friendly you could invest better in creating a web service unifying the business logic for all of them and creating native UI for each environment so the app feels friendly for all kinds of users.