Zend Technologies and Adobe Systems integrate a pair of Eclipse-based tools, giving developers a single interface for building both Web and mobile apps.
If you've been waiting to figure out a strategy to handle native mobile applications, then your wait may have paid off. A new tool developed by Zend and Adobe that is built on Eclipse and leverages both PHP and Flash technologies may be the light out of the darkness.
While browser-based applications are fine for the desktop, the preference for native applications running on a mobile device can be seen in the 500,000 applications available in the Apple App Store and the 15 billion downloads to date by some 200 million Apple fans. If a mobile application is native, it just seems to work better than when it's running in a browser.
"There are things you can do natively that you can't do from within a browser," says Michael Scarpato, IBM alliance director at Zend.
So you decide to go with a native app, but if you have to create applications for two or three different operating systems, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry phone, BlackBerry PlayBook, HP webOS—and soon Windows 8—you could be talking about a serious investment—or at best a lot of time. And that doesn't take into account what will be required to maintain all these different versions.
Nevertheless, the trend toward mobile use and applications appears to be unstoppable, and Scarpato notes that analysts are predicting that by 2013, the number of Internet-connected mobile devices will exceed the number of PCs hooked up to cyberspace.
Enter Flash Builder for PHP, a joint project by Zend Technologies and Adobe Systems, that has integrated Zend Studio for IBM i with Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 behind a single user interface, with a single product installation that creates a single code base for every device. Well, it's not quite every device yet, but the applications it creates run on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry Playbook with more interfaces on the way. And if you factor in Zend Studio's HTML 5 and JavaScript capabilities, there is nothing you can't output to, even if you have to create a second version.
The secret to the sauce is Adobe's cross-platform runtime engine AIR, which stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime and allows an application to run on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and now a selection of mobile platforms. AIR installs the first time you download an AIR application and acts as a kind of wrapper, allowing the app to run on different platforms. The nice thing about it is you can build the app once and run it on a variety of mobile or desktop platforms.
The reason that Flash Builder for PHP can be useful for IBM i developers is that it makes it relatively straightforward to create apps for mobile devices and also to extend the capabilities of Zend Studio for i that you may already be using to create Web applications. Flash Builder for PHP has a common debugging tool that handles both the front-end Flex code and the back-end PHP code.
"A developer trying to debug an application running on a mobile device can literally start the debugger in the application of the mobile device in Flash, step through the Flex code looking for the problem, and if that code happens to cross over the boundary and make a call to the PHP server back-end, the debugger for PHP will pick up right where the Flash debugger left off," says Kent Mitchell, Zend senior director for product management. "It will let the developer walk through the PHP code, understand what's going on, then continue all the way out the Flex code so you have one continuous debugging session for the entire application. This is despite the fact the application may be running on an iPhone through Apache to PHP on the IBM i and potentially even calling the IBM i database."
Mitchell says showing that to developers elicits a response not unlike that of a parched hiker returning from a week in the outback, dreaming of something cold and wet before being handed an ice cream upon reaching the car.
But wait—there's more. If you have an existing PHP application and there is an existing PHP class that has the operations of the data you want in the Flash code, you can just point at the PHP and tell Flash Builder for PHP to generate the Flash value objects. It will generate all the infrastructure on the Flash side, and all the infrastructure on the PHP side, to connect the them.
"Literally within a couple of clicks your existing PHP code can now be utilized by Flash," says Mitchell.
Since both Zend Studio and Flash Builder are built on Eclipse, teams from both Zend and Adobe realized that the two development tools could be combined. Essentially, you can take any Eclipse product and install it into any other Eclipse product as long as the product supports it. Both Studio and Flash Builder supported plug-ins, so either could be plugged into the other.
"But what we needed to do was work jointly as a team between the two companies and integrate the work flows together so things like the integrated debugging and creating corresponding code all worked.… In essence, we had to build a layer that understood Flash Builder and Studio enough to handle this integration between the two in the work flow," says Mitchell.
The result is a product that could make building mobile apps far easier for IBM i developers than they had previously thought possible.
Whether this tool is for you, however, is something you can decide for yourself during a 60-day free trial after downloading it from the Zend Web site. If you are already a registered user of Zend Studio, you likely are preregistered. If you decide to make the new tool your own, there are discounts on Flash Builder for PHP for current owners of Zend Studio for IBM i as well as for owners of different Adobe products. New users, however, will find the Standard Edition of Flash Builder for PHP listed at $399, while the Premium Edition—with performance improvements for large application development and network monitoring features—priced at $799 per developer.
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