Android Developer Lab

Today at Artech we released the first bits for developing Smart Devices applications with Genexus, one of our main targets platforms is Android.

With this beta we can start creating some basic applications, because the Android Developer Lab haven't an official application for Android I created one in just 30 minutes using GeneXus.

It's quite easy, I create 2 entities (Session, Presenter) and apply the Work With pattern over them, after I created a basic dashboard for the application.

You can see who are the presenters and the times for the sessions. It was easy and fun.

If you want to install the application here you have the link and the QR Code just in case.

Smart Devices Generator for Android, BlackBerry, iOS

The Smart Devices revolution is a fact. The big players want to have a good position in this new world.

Apple, Google, RIM and the emerging WP7 seems to be the players. (Nokia is trying to maintain their site of the feature phone era but it’s quite complicated)

Every player needs two key components for success:

• Awesome Devices
• Awesome Applications

Creating awesome applications is our task, the developer task.

Creating an awesome application for reading a RSS on iOS, Android or Blackberry could be automatized with a Wizard, but creating the smart device complement of your Business Application is another challenge.

I think this challenge it’s impossible to achieve at a reasonable cost with traditional mechanisms of software development.

Create a business application today means at least:

• Create the data and business layer
• Expose the BL using some universal technology like HTML-CSS-Javascript
• (Universality means multiple browser, multiple device)
• Expose some use cases for several enterprise roles using native applications

Just the architecture to create this is a challenge, after you created the Web Application for example using PHP, you need to create a full Web API to be consumed by native clients, you need standard authentication mechanism, you need a security model, and you need to create several native clients taking into account the rules and styles for each device.

In Artech we have been working in a new generator for this new world. The aim of this generator is to allow create Business Applications and their Smart Device complement at low costs.

We strongly believe that the Ideas are platform independent, so we follow a Model Driven approach to create Smart Devices applications.

What kind of applications? Productivity applications.

Productivity applications have many challenges that we are going to focus on during the process of building the generator.

Today we are releasing the first bits of our GeneXus X Evolution 2 wich include this new generator.

I hope you can start enjoying creating applications with the Smart Devices Generator and spread your ideas in this new revolution.

http://www.genexus.com/xev2beta