By and large, computer programmers are, by both nature and necessity, a detail-oriented bunch. It takes someone who can get down into the weeds, the world of bits and bytes, of ones and zeroes, to craft an effective program to make a computer do something useful.
In one of the many memorable scenes from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, heroes Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves on Earth, circa 2,000,000 BC, in the company of a large population of middle managers, hairdressers, management consultants, marketing people…in short, the “useless” third of their home planet who were sent to colonize Earth. In a committee meeting, they discuss the difficulty they’ve had in inventing the wheel. Ford Prefect, exasperated, exclaims that it’s the “single simplest machine in the Universe,” to which a marketing person replies, “All right Mr. Wiseguy, if you’re so clever, you tell us what color it should be.”
The grand vision for human-computer interaction in recent years has been mobility: Users with lightweight, low-power “dumb terminals” communicating with cloud services via ubiquitous and speedy wireless connections to perform every computing task imaginable, from email and web surfing to more computationally intensive tasks such as video editing and big-data analytics. All of this, of course, would be courtesy of the cloud; there would no longer be any need, outside of perhaps gaming, for laptops and desktops with super-powerful, multicore processors.
Continuing the flurry of posts here related to cross-platform development, we turn our attention now to yet another up-and-coming cross-platform technology: Electron. The Electron framework (formerly known as Atom Shell) enables developers to build desktop apps using standard Web tools: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
Greenfield and brownfield software development are two different approaches to creating software, selected on the basis of the condition the project is in when we step on board.
Ever since iOS and Android established themselves as the two dominant mobile platforms, app developers have had to make a choice: If you’re going to create an app with both Android and iOS versions, which do you work on first? “Both” has never been a viable option, because developing for each platform is sufficiently different that precious little code can be shared between the two. This means that app development takes twice as long as it should, sometimes longer. In an environment where speed to market can determine commercial success or failure, this state of affairs is a major handicap.
