If You Can WebDev, You Can Mobile

The majority of developers that I know are involved in enterprise development, producing solutions for business and commerce. It is in this sphere that TACO shines. Building business apps does not require heavy use of graphics, is not reliant on speedy processors and is generally about information and form related data. For this target environment, TACO is perfect. If you need to design games, sure, for lightweight offerings you can use a framework like PHASER, but in general apps that are very speed and graphics heavy most development houses will go straight to raw native.

Developing for hybrid mobile is best done by writing a single page application. There are good reasons for this that you can read on the Interwebs. I will explain the details in another article at a later stage. When writing a simple single page application you can of course use your own simple code., but be careful! Once your application becomes more than 3..4 pages, you really should consider using a framework. This can be something lightweight like a combination of a router like SammyJS and a UI framework like bootstrap, or you can use a framework that's built from the ground up for hybrid mobile like Sencha or the Ionic Framework. Ionic is based on the Angular framework, and as such is incredibly powerful, feature rich and critically, very robust.

There is one major benefit to writing hybrid apps that should not be discounted. Clearly, to get an app to a user, you must place your app on the play or app store - this takes time, requires that you go through the approval process etc. Depending on the platform (Windows, Apple, Google), it can take hours or days. Once you have your app published, for each subsequent version update you make, you need to resubmit to the app-store ... and good luck if you launch your app with a bad bug and have to get it out to users quickly ... clearly this is a problem. Thanks to some other clever technology from Microsoft, this problem, at least for Hybrid developers, has been solved. Called 'CodePush', this technology solution allows you to make minor or major changes to your app locally, on your machine, and push these out live to your mobile users, bypassing the various app stores. Its very simple, but works like magic.

Getting started and really dug into Hybrid mobile development requires more than a simple introduction like this. I have a backlog of mobile development with VS Taco articles ready to write and look forward to finalising them. In the meantime however, I urge you to have a look at the build session given by Ryan Salva of Microsoft, and Max Lynch of Ionic, and learn how together, they made the //BUILD mobile app, using a combination of Visual Studio, Azure mobile services, Ionic, and Code Push. Heres the link, do yourself a favor and take an hour out to be inspired about how you can use your WebFoo, do to Mobile-too :)

Useful links:

• Visual studio tools for apache cordova
• Beginners guide to getting started with TACO
• Code push
• Ionic framework for mobile
• HockeyApp
• Azure mobile services