Five links to improve mobile development applications

Today's mobile phone can be said to have an extraordinary "transformation" ability, it has changed the way people communicate with the computer, the transformation of the way people communicate, as well as people buy software (APP) and the way software inventions. It seems that everything we know is or has been transformed by a mobile phone.

For app developers, the challenge of this transformation is quite frightening. Over the past 15-20 years, developers have focused on creating and refining the process of designing software for single platform single elements such as Windows desktop computers. But now, for mobile software development, with the expansion of the operating system (platform), even experienced software designers have been feeling powerless. Because before they mastered, debugging all the tools, processes and technology, if used in mobile phone software development, seems to have no effect.

In today's development market, there has been a scramble for development tools and development processes around the next generation that will make the new generation of multi-platform mobile phone development as effective as desktop or web development. To achieve such a goal, the following five links are expected to play a key role.

1, build

Along with the increase of the platform, different "build" requirements are also increasing. Today, if you want to build an application that can be run on iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and so on, it needs to involve a wide variety of integrated development environments (IDES), Software development Kits (SDK), and operating systems. Even the hybrid program, which uses existing HTML and JavaScript technologies to implement multiple platforms, also requires a large number of hybrid architectures to accommodate each target operating system.

Multi-platform worlds need tools that are optimized for multi-platform software development, rather than stand-alone systems or obsolete technologies. The search for new and improved tools should help mobile application developers bridge the gap between platforms, saving time for managing software and devoting more time to writing software.

2, debugging

For mobile software development, there are few difficult problems like debugging.

There are two main reasons why debugging is difficult:

1 Available application software debugging mobile phone operating system simulator the existing number is far below the demand;

2 software is generally developed on the computer, and then can be deployed from the computer to the mobile phone terminal to debug the program. Now the mobile program steps are complex and the computer-based simulator will not improve significantly. Therefore, we can only improve the mobile phone directly debugging tools, to achieve direct debugging on the phone, in order to reduce the current software development and debugging pain.

3, test

, once you create an application, you need some automated testing to ensure that the applications downloaded to the App Store are working properly before the subsequent updates are released. In the "previous" Microsoft era, this is a relatively easy task. But now because there are a variety of mobile smart machines, testing is not only in different operating systems, but also to cover different device terminals. Although tools such as the cloud Equipment lab now appear, much remains to be done to make the process of recording, feedback, and managing tests work.

4, deployment

Whether your program is for the Open App Store or for some private user groups, the deployment of mobile apps now requires far more manual steps than previously. These closed systems are often unlikely to allow your program to be developed once and deployed to different platforms. If your target audience is not an open application mall, the deployment process will be more difficult. There are thousands of in-house business applications that are developed every day, but there are different ways to deploy these applications to employees ' devices.

5, optimize

Websites are posted on servers, computer programs run on computers, and these relationships are relatively static. But mobile software is dynamic, with the user mobile, or online, or online, in short, once released, it is not under the control of the publisher.

To understand the state of our program and its dynamic analysis, we need to monitor the software that has been released. Developers need to monitor the usability and performance of the program, and track the problems encountered by ordinary users, and some failures that cause the program to be less than 60 frames per second or fps (a metric that measures program responsiveness).

Statistics show that the proportion of developers who have developed software that has been deprecated because of the initial version is 1/4 of the total released. Developers use a variety of tools to help them improve the quality of their programs so that their applications do not become part of the 1/4.

The difficult aspect of mobile development is just beginning, and we desperately need better mobile development tools. Fortunately, new tools are emerging to help developers transition this transition period. So such a difficult transition could only be a short-term phenomenon.