Erick Engelke
I’ve created many native apps for Android, Windows Phone and IOS, as well as applications for Windows, Mac OS/X and Unix (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris).
I found Delphi handy for supporting several of these mobile and desktop/laptop platforms at once with C-style native speed. The stronger type checking makes it preferable to C in many cases. I still speak C a lot of the time and earned my chops on it. I don’t care for C++, too many oddball rules compared to the simple language it updated. PHP I like, including the object oriented extensions. Javascript is okay. I’ve used Java but am not a big fan, I find the classes more confusing that PHP’s.
My third book will likely be on HTML5 Builder, a successor to RAD PHP, which is a successor to Delphi for PHP. I’ve done so many projects with it and have accumulated so many tips I’d like to share that with others. I have a few hundred pages written, but editing will require some dedicated time that has eluded me thus far.
HTML5 Builder also helps you build native JQueryMobile/Javascript/AJAX enabled PhoneGap apps for Android, Blackberry, Symbion, Apple IOS, Windows phone and others. If you don’t need the speed of a compiler, this is a great way to get started. II hate trying to keep all the development environments running, so I use build.phonegap.com from Adobe. The subscription is $9.99 a month and they keep updated, I find it’s worth the price to always be able to produce store-ready apps when doing PhoneGap.
On unix, I regularly use AWK or PHP. I’m not smart enough to be fluent in Perl; I guess I just don’t find it elegant.
Erick