In search for the one solution to rule them all (for mobile dev)…

First there was Flex

Once upon a time I discovered Adobe Flex, and toyed with the idea of building mobile apps with a single code base and have the ability to publish it to iOS and Android. It was all going great until I tried hooking up web services and databases which was inefficient and very challenging.

I wasn’t giving up but then Adobe Flex became Apache Flex and all of a sudden all the Flex developers I knew were abandoning ship in favor of HTML 5 and/or native mobile development.

So back to square one.

The PhoneGaps of the World

As an Adobe Cloud subscriber, PhoneGap was the immediate next option that popped up but this option uses JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and that again was not what I was looking for.

And following suit, along came several other similar offerings which jumped on the HTML/JavaScript bandwagon, but again, I was looking for an alternative to this.

Landed on Xamarin and Mono

The journey has brought Xamarin to my attention, and at the moment I am discovering its capabilities during the 30-day trial.

Xamarin uses Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET framework and allows you to write code in C# and uses wrappers for Android and iOS so you can use C# to invoke the other frameworks in a very convenient way.

You also have the option of using a standalone IDE, or using a Visual Studio plug-in.

The premise and the promise are pretty ambitious, plus it’s not a cheap option, especially if your business is not making money.

I would love to hear about your journey, and also about your experience with Xamarin. Please drop us a note on Twitter @inerdtia or directly to me @alejandrormz, and feel free to comment here.

 

* The Apache Flex logo is property of the flex.apache.org.