Techiniques for writing Android, iPad, iPhone clients using remote data

Question

I need to explore the world "You wrote a killer application, but do you have an Android / iPhone / iPad client?"

My questions:

1), which is the best way to send data to these devices? Soap and Relax as suggested here ? Or are there some specific methods? (My application is written in Delphi, and I can provide data using webservices if necessary)

2) For the x-platform (where by x I mean mostly apple products and android) is development a tool? Or the only solution is to write one client on a platform that "implements" a web application optimized for mobile devices?

3) which are tags for caching locally some data / working offline? Difference in two worlds or is it widespread?

Answer 1

Sencha Touch 1.0 was released this week and is now free for commercial use. Sencha Touch 1.0 is compatible with Apple iOS and Google Android.

Sencha Touch is the world's first framework application built specifically to use HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility and optimization. We make specific use of HTML5 for delivering such as audio and video, as well as a localStorage proxy for storing data offline.

localStorage is a new HTML5 feature that allows you to store data on the client. However, it differs from cookies in some key ways. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Storage

Sencha is the company behind Ext JS , the Javascript library, which is also available through a Delphi shell / binding called extpascal , so it is possible Sencha is based on Ext JS technology, and creating a Delphi client web application can be a logical integration path.

Answer 2

For your number 2 only, you can check GeneXus X Evolution 2 . The main goal of GeneXus is to develop business applications in the user IDE and create the necessary platform for each platform you want to target.

The current stable release is Evolution 1 and is aimed at many platforms.

Evolution 2 is still under development (a beta has already been released, look at # XEv2Beta on twitter). When it is released, it will add support for the most common smartdevices platforms (Apple, Android, BlackBerry), but later they also plan to add support for other platforms.