There are two distinct ways to develop applications for Apple’s iPhone, the top tech gadget of the year.Programmers can choose to create optimized web applications using web languages, or to write native programs using the iPhone SDK. Rather than seeing this as an either-or proposition, developers should consider the choice a continuum and pick the right tool to create each individual program.
With iPhone web applications, programmers can enjoy all the advantages of the Internet, including ease of development and deployment, speed of updating, and off-line server access. Meanwhile, with iPhone native applications, programmers can immerse themselves in a sophisticated development environment, dig deep into an object-oriented language, and access the iPhone’s built-in utilities, like its accelerometers and its GPS.
This session highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each style of programming and discuss ways to hybridize them, creating integrated projects that utilize the best of both worlds.
Christopher Allen is one of the leaders of the iPhone Web Developer community. He is the host of iphonewebdev.com, which is the largest community of iPhone-based web developers anywhere, and manages its mailing list. He also helped to organize iPhoneDevCamp and oversaw its Hack-a-thon. Christopher is a longtime technologist, and is also a leader in social software and was one of the authors of TLS, the next-generation SSL protocol.
