Anyone close to the field of web development is pretty used to the roller coaster of learning about some feature of modern browsers, HTML5, or CSS3 and then the crushing disappointment when you realize that some 60% of users are still on a browser that was outdated when it was first released… 7 years ago.
A shining light in development right now is mobile. Mobile development is just plain sexy. You’ve got apps, tiny programs communicating with API’s and each other, solving a new wave of problems and quickly becoming an integral part of people’s mobile lives.
Problem being, mobile app development is a significantly different way of thinking than web development. Suddenly you have to worry about RAM, getters, setters, and threads (oh my). Not to mention that Objective C and Java aren’t the sort of thing you can familiarize yourself with over a long weekend like Ruby or Python.
The thought of both being betrayed by the painful adoption rate of new web browsers and the exciting things going on the other side of a steep learning curve is enough to drive a web developer to binge on pizza bites and a Star Wars marathon.
Mobile Development Has Options, Good Ones
Never fear ye weary web developer, there is another way. Fun thing about mobile devices, for the most part, they all use pretty modern webkit based browsers. What’s more, all of them have UI elements that are little more than instances of Webkit that can parse and display HTML5 and CSS3 right in an app.
By simply loading these web views, you can create advanced HTML5 and Javascript based apps and deploy to iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile with far less reworking than working with a given platform’s language of choice.
To top it off, tools like PhoneGap and Sencha provide Javascript based hooks in to system functionality like the camera, accelerometer, and even access to the file system.
Yes, you can simultaneously use all the exciting new features of HTML5 and CSS3 and develop exciting mobile apps for multiple platforms all at once.
I’ve seen the future for web developers, and it is mobile (at least until IE can figure out auto updates). While not a very shocking statement, it’s a very exciting one.
