Travel Through the Wormhole of HTML5 and C++ With MoSync
HTML5 may be the best thing since sliced bread, but some might argue it's not moving quite fast enough to keep up with the demands of the mobile market. APIs from W3C are slowly emerging, making it hard for pure HTML5 apps to take advantage of certain device functionality like high processor speeds, mobile cameras, accelerometers and even barometers. Meanwhile, clients and managers are bringing up HTML5 to developers, expecting them to get onboard, without fully understanding its limitations.
But MoSync, a small company from Sweden, has released the latest version of its open-source development environment, which it says combines the ease of development and UI slickness of HTML5 with the powerful capabilities of C++, giving developers the best of both worlds. Part of its latest (v2.7) release, it’s dubbed "Wormhole Technology", and offers several benefits for developers, while maintaining Mosync's core capability of enabling cross-platform development.
The main benefit is really playing to the strengths of both HTML5 and C++, as Wormhole lets users keep their UI and application logic in HTML5 and Javascript, but drop down into C++ to access certain functionalities or perform certain actions. For instance, if an app needed to perform physics calculations that weren't feasible in HTML5 or JavaScript, it could do them with C++.
The SDK also allows experienced C++ developers to transition their apps to HTML5. They can use MoSync to take an app that may be 80% C++, and do the presentation layer in HTML5, and as HTML5 becomes more powerful, easily replace more of the C++ code with it. The reverse is true for web developers, who can take an HTML5 app and add in C++ where needed.
That is where the MoSync community takes over and can really help out; both the company and contributors are creating C++ "snippets" that can be dropped in to apps to add new features and functions. This allows web devs to easily access advanced functionality, and also give C++ devs an opportunity to expand their reach in the community.
Enabling this hybrid approach not only opens the scope of mobile development up to a much wider audience, but it also enables mobile developers to more easily comply with the wishes and demands of clients or management, who want HTML5 apps (often because of the hype around it), but don't always understand its technical limitations.
What MoSync really brings is the guarantee that you don’t have to hedge your bets on HTML5, that you don’t need to worry about starting a project unsure if you are going to run into an issue that HTML5 just can’t do yet. There is always that safe C++ fallback which has been around for a little while -- 32 years -- that you can leverage until HTML5 fully comes of age.?