Mobile platform (android?) for developing apps (offline website)

Question

Some years ago I dipped my foot in the water of developing WML websites and J2ME apps - and found it a rather unpleasant experience.

Hearing stories about developers making $$$ in their free time, writing trivial apps for iphone and android, and having a (top secret - don't tell anybody) idea for an app that everyone will immediately rush out and buy, I thought I'd have a look at the current state of play regarding development tools - however while there are no end of people pushing branded products, its often unclear what the programming language is like and what integration it provides with mobile devices.

I could develop most of the functionality as an online website - but for reasons of confidentiality and the ridiculous cost and low speed of mobile internet connections, it makes a lot of sense to deploy most of the functionality client-side.

Google gears like the ideal tool for implementing this - but Google have pulled the plug on the project.

The reasons I liked GG were:

• html rendering (there will be a lot of content in the app)
• a standard programming language (javascript)
• integration with geolocation

If it had supported the accelerometer and bluetooth it would have been perfect!

Looking around at other approaches, I see that standard Android apps are developed using Java. While I'm not a big fan of the language, I could stretch a point in this case - but what about all the content rendering? Is there an off-the-shelf html renderer for android which I could then build my own handler for?

(if you're getting the impression that I'm something of a programming snob - you're probably right)

I had a quick look at Appcelerator - which has lots of pages telling me how wonderful it is - but I've yet to see any details of how it works, what the language looks like, how it integrates with hardware on the client, how to produced a packaged app for resale....

Any suggestions for a suitable toolkit/platform?

TIA

Answer 1

Yes google gears is deprecated but so what? As they clearly state they intend to continue with the product until a suitable replacement is found (AKA HTML5). Just be sure to write your application with a migration path to HTML5 in mind and you're sweet.

Besides, its open source... So if you need something added or changed the code is all there.

I am currently in the process of gambling my entire future on the google gears platform. Don’t forget that they currently use it in GMail so I don’t see them stopping at least basic continuing development on the platform.