Embarcadero's newly updated visual development environment could simplify both mobile and Web development.
One of the attendees in the IBM i track of the ZendCon conference last month expressed frustration in building PHP Web applications when it came to mastering elements handled by JavaScript, HTML, CSS3, and other art forms. Using various tools, frameworks, and IDEs allowed his team back home to get just so far, he said. Then things started to slow down. I realized that he probably was at the conference to learn how to get his crew back on track.
The day prior was one in which I sat down with John "JT" Thomas, Embarcadero Technologies' director of Product Management for the company's RAD Tools division. Thomas knows a lot about application development and the various tools available to help make life a little easier for developers. Embarcadero, named appropriately for its headquarters location in San Francisco, had started in 1993 with a single database tool for Sybase DBAs, I learned, but today maintains offices around the world, claims some 20 database products and application development tools, and caters to about three million customers. It was acquired by Thoma Cressey Bravo in 2007 and the next year acquired CodeGear from Borland Software. With the $24 million purchase came a collection of prized rapid application development (RAD) tools, including Delphi, JBuilder, and others.
This day, the company was announcing the release of its newly enhanced PHP development solution, RadPHP XE2, which had been updated to handle mobile development and now included some 35 components in Zend Framework (also celebrating a refresh at the conference). The more JT talked about RadPHP XE2, the more I began to see it as a tool that RPG and IBM i developers might find helpful.
Before you begin to suspect I might be trying to sell you something, let me explain that anyone can download RadPHP XE2 from the Embarcadero Web site for a free 30-day trial. If you do decide to buy it, the perpetual license for a single developer is $299. The company was offering a show special, but alas, the show is over!
So what's so special about yet another PHP IDE? Well, first, this one is so simple to use that it's really meant for the business user. It's a standard editor and debugger, but it also features a visual drag-and-drop development environment with more than 200 visual components for building UIs. It presents the developer with visual widgets for both the HTML front-end and the PHP back-end of the application.
For mobile devices that employ a browser based on the WebKit browser layout engine—and most today finally do—then RadPHP XE2 will support the device. That means you will be able to package and sign your "application" for distribution through the proprietary online app stores. This implementation does not provide true "native apps," per se, but they appear to the user to behave like native apps; actually, they're using browser technology and are much easier to create than a true native application. The beauty is they work across all three major mobile platforms, so you can support a bring-your-own device policy without having to develop applications with three different mobile SDKs.
The tool can get by in a pinch to create standalone applications for iOS and Android devices, but the faster-to-market browser-based solution is its real strength. For building multiple robust native apps, Thomas recommends the more powerful RAD Studio XE2 that includes Delphi, C++ Builder, Embarcadero Prism, as well as the RadPHP product.
Nevertheless, despite their slight speed limitations, hybrid applications optimized for mobile devices are a fast way to support numerous different platforms, and they also work with all the hardware sensors on the mobile devices, such as cameras, accelerometers, and GPS sensors. Plus, you can distribute them via the Apple and Android app stores. You wind up with touch-optimized mobile Web apps for phones and tablets, and you can integrate database and query tools to serve the information users want. This Web-based application approach essentially is the same taken by Adobe with its Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP, but you're building the front-end in Flash.
The tool provides both code and design views of PHP applications and HTML pages in the integrated development environment (IDE). The visual design view can be used to build user interfaces and database connections by simply dragging and dropping components onto a form. Changes to the visual designer and the underlying code are always in sync.
Apart from Zend Framework, RadPHP XE2 uses two other key technologies. One is PhoneGap, also known as Apache Callback, which is an open-source mobile development framework that provides the underlying JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 technology for hybrid mobile apps and allows the developer to natively target all smartphones with a single codebase. Currently supported OSes include various versions of iOS, Android, RIM BlackBerry, MS Windows Mobile, Nokia Symbian, and HP's webOS. Support for the Samsung Wave is under development. Interestingly, Adobe bought Nitobi, creator of PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build, last month, though company executives say the PhoneGap framework will remain open source and is going to the Apache Software Foundation.
The other technology used in RadPHP XE2 is jQuery, which includes a JavaScript library, among other jQuery projects, to simplify HTML document- and event-handling and AJAX interactions.
"We feel that RadPHP XE2 now solves the problem that enterprises have been facing of having to support multiple mobile devices with multiple SDKs from the different phone providers. That implied a tremendous amount of work, but [it] isn't necessary any longer with the RadPHP framework now supporting mobile," says Thomas.
And for those young at heart or those whose Facebook aspirations involve more serious incursions into the world of social networking, RadPHP also can be used for developing Facebook applications. Have you ever heard of FarmVille?
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