Developing Android Apps Visually, In 3 parts 78
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Dobb's has a three-part blog (all three parts are up; this is part 1) about using App Inventor. The focus isn't so much on the technology but rather the discussion of 'can visual development let anyone program?' If so, is App Inventor really visual development? And should we be teaching real programmers about visual development. Most of the conclusions are in part 3. As a byproduct, they show you how to put App Inventor output on the Market and there are two games on the market (free) that resulted from the articles." Here's part two, to round out the trilogy.
Re:Not worth it (Score:3, Informative)
Best, they will run on iOS and any future mobile device with WebKit.
But will they run fast? When Apple decided to add JIT execution of JavaScript to Safari in iOS 4.3, only pages running in Safari got the fast treatment. Applications using a UIWebView and web sites that have been bookmarked on the home screen were stuck with the old, slow, interpretive JavaScript engine rather than running a JIT engine in a separate process.
Just started playing with AppInventor this week (Score:4, Informative)
The Cons: I tend to be kind of a linear, procedural thinker -- I cut my teeth on BASIC, learned COBOL in high school, learned Pascal and Perl in college, and now use mostly Perl and a little Python -- so AppInventor requires me to approach writing programs a little differently. For example, in Perl, if I want to compare two strings, I think it out the way the line is typed on the console; AppInventor, on the other hand, seems kind of like programming in Reverse Polish Notation
The Pros: I am quite impressed with the ease with which I started using AppInventor. When I first started using Python, it was very easy for me to read someone else's scripts and comprehend what they were doing. Writing Python, on the other hand, was a bigger hurdle. To be fair, a lot of that was because I've been writing Perl for so long, that I try to do things the Perl way (okay...ONE of the many Perl ways ) and then have to search Google to find the way it's supposed to be done in Python. AppInventor, on the other hand, is just a matter of snapping puzzle pieces together. If you try to do something that would be a syntax error in a traditional language, AppInventor immediately pops up an error telling you why you can't do whatever it is you are trying to do -- and the error messages are pretty intuitive. Procedural errors are a whole other story -- see the caveat above about using TinyDB.
Experienced programmers may turn up their nose at tools like AppInventor since it lowers the barrier of entry so much, but IMHO, tools that make it easy for people to learn programming concepts are a Good Thing. Will people churn out crappy code in AppInventor? Yep. Do people already churn out crap code in Perl, Java, C/C++/C#? Yep. Will skilled programmers make well-designed apps in AppInventor? I don't see why not. I imagine the quality of the code will probably depend upon some of the concerns I described above, but the *design* will be a reflection upon the skill and experience of the developer. I don't see any reason why a good developer will suddenly be reduced to creating crappy apps with tools like A
Re:Real programmers... (Score:4, Informative)