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Mon, 23 Nov 2009

19:51 – Real programming?

Frank's iPhone developers are stupid! post on Planet Grep today made me a little grumpy.

Stating that iPhone developers are "stupid" because they target a restrictive environment is a bit blunt. Further suggesting that all their problems would magically go away if only they'd write "web applications" is criminally short-sighted at best.

While I'm happy to accept that some aspects of "web development" are "real programming" (and I have great respect for some of the people who identify themselves as "web developers"), I'm not so happy with the implication being made that "web development" has somehow obsoleted or replaced what has traditionally been considered as "real programming".

Frank seems to feel that all the things people want to implement natively could just as well be expressed as "web applications". I beg to differ. "Web applications" may be a reasonable choice for applications involving the manipulation of data in some way, but they're inherently unsuited to many other things.

The iPhone provides a lot of interesting hardware in a fairly compact battery-powered package. I can easily see people imagining things for it to do which Apple did not intend it for. Asserting that "web applications" could be used to implement all these things suggests a very unrealistic worldview.

I don't see "web applications" being used for interrupt handling or DMA or for that matter anything that involves networking on any level beyond the payload of a TCP stream. While those low-level things can conveivably be driven by "web applications" on the presentation layer, perhaps even down to the session layer, something underneath still needs to "be there".

It must be incredibly frustrating to target an environment which only allows "blessed" code to run, especially if the requirements for blessing are not all technical and the organization responsible for the blessing has commercial interests in not blessing code it deems to be threatening in some way.

I'm not very impressed with the "stupid" label being applied to people who can motivate themselves to target such restrictive environments and by extension to everyone who is (still?) not writing "web applications".

[ category: /activism | 4 comments on this entry ]

ha, a discussion, great!

first of, let me start by stating (what i thought was) something obvious; I merely quoted Peter-Paul Koch, the guy behind (the great) quirksblog. so these actually are not my words. but i do agree with a lot of what he says (excluding the provocative insults maybe, i'm not really the insulting type of guy).

next; it's obvious that not every native application can be turned into a webapp (cfr. PPK's blogpost).

but indeed; a lot of native iphone-apps could be turned into webapps and there are clear advantages in doing so; it not only helps you to circumvent apple's silly gatekeeper-function, but it will also allow your app to become less bound to that singular platform.

to conclude; if you app doesn't force you to go native, it boils down to a choice between developing in/ for a golden cage (the iphone development environment and appstore) or radically choosing for freedom and openness.

I know what i would do ;-)

Posted by frank at Mon Nov 23 20:29:34 2009
I must have read over the fact that you were quoting someone else, Frank.  My apologies.

Your conclusion is valid.  If an application maps well on the "web" paradigm, it should by all means be implemented as a "web application".

If you look beyond the "pocket webbrowser" view of the iPhone, however, you quickly find that the number of applications which lend themselves to the "web" paradigm becomes vanishingly small in the face of all the other things you could be doing with the array of IOs and radios the iPhone presents in a very portable battery-powered package.  Calling people who take this view of the iPhone "stupid" is what I found objectionable.

Thanks for pointing out those weren't your words.

Posted by Philip Paeps at Mon Nov 23 20:54:41 2009
With that in mind, it will be interesting to see if more people start to appreciate just how artificial Apple's restrictions on the iPhone (and Google's on the Android!) are when Nokia releases the N900 to the creative masses who are able to look beyond the "pocket webbrowser" image these gadgets present at first sight.

While I have no immediate desire to target these platforms myself, I can think of a number of applications they could be used for which really don't map on the "web" view of the world.

Posted by Philip Paeps at Mon Nov 23 21:02:38 2009
I have to say that I'm reasonably intrigued by the whole "augmented reality" thing. Tinkering with iphones/androids/n900s would more than likely be interesting, but the hardware is a bit pricey and mobile bandwidth doesn't seem to come cheap either :-(.

Posted by Bram at Wed Nov 25 22:56:54 2009

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