"It's just Web programming"

[jducoeur]

If I hear one more statement that programming for the iPhone is trivial because it is simply Web programming, I am going to hunt Steve Jobs and put him down.

Let's be clear here: there is no such thing as "just" Web programming, at least if you're doing sophisticated stuff. Each browser is different in its quirks and characteristics -- the same code, executed on IE, Firefox and Safari, will generally perform a little bit differently on each. And the iPhone is more different than most: there are a lot of assumptions about UI built into Web programming that don't hold true for the iPhone. (For instance, the notion that "hover" means something, or the keycodes returned when the user presses "Enter".)

If you're building UIs for the Web, and you want them to be fancy, responsive and cross-browser, be prepared for real work on *each* target browser. While things still aren't as bad as the early days of the Browser Wars, it's still quite a black art.

(This rant brought to you by one too many facile comments online, poo-pooh'ing the notion that Apple needs to provide iPhone developers any technical support, since it's "just Web programming"...)

Comments

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

I mean I love doing Ajax/javascript and I've been doing it enough to know that it takes real skill.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Devli's Advocating for the moment: maybe the intent was not to imply that it is easy, but that it was a problem of an already known class of tasks. As in, "you don't have to do anything more than what you do with web programming".

In physics and math, there's a common habit of noting when a problem fits into an already known class. If I look at a problem and say, "It's just orbital mechanics," I don't mean to say that the partial differential equations are easy, but I do mean that you can use the usual methods to deal with them.

[jducoeur]

I'm fairly sure that *was* the intent. Problem is, it's not really true in this case -- the iPhone is qualitatively different from all other browsers in some subtle but important ways, so the problem doesn't simply reduce to well-understood techniques. A lot of smart people are spending more effort than they ought to need to, in order to figure out those differences...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Of course, he just wants you to have your app work in Safari. This should simplify your task immensely, while simultaneously robbing you of 94% of your market.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

robbing you of 94% of your market

are you referring to the 94% of iPhones that run some browser other than Safari? :)

frankly, i had figured that if someone were to write a “third-party app” for the iPhone, one would want it to be optimized specifically for the Safari on the iPhone, and in fact possibly not run at all under other browsers.

-steve

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that's what Jobs wants -- but if I wrote a webapp to run on the iPhone, I'd want it to run on all similar phones, and be accessible through Firefox and IE on the desktop, to maximize adoption.

Unless it used some unique feature of the iPhone -- but it doesn't seem to have any particularly unique (accessible) capabilities, just a decent package for a bunch of normal ones.

[baavgai.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Last I'd paid attention, Apple had pretty much told third party developers to get bent. Forcing them to write only browser based apps seems almost more evil, somehow.

I agree completely. Doing anything complex in what's essentially self mutating html immediately reveals that the medium was never meant for such things. I admire well done web apps mostly because it's the path of most resistance when it comes to UI development. It's also like a watching a high wire act, waiting for any given browser inconsistency to make the thing fall to it's doom.

[jducoeur]

The browser-only thing was the way they weaseled out of the controversy of "no outside apps". Really, I'm not sure I would even mind it so much (I'm pretty deeply into the web-app side, and have a lot of respect for what you can do with it) if they had provided a good SDK for doing that, with clear documentation of the differences, and maybe an implementation of Google Gears to give you some local storage. But it's pretty clear that the whole thing was a last-minute backpedal, not a plan...

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

You really don't think this was planned all along? The fact that Apple released Safari-for-Windows, which looks to me like it was a huge effort, seemed to indicate that they had always planned Safari to be the iPhone development platform, and SfW is their (first attempt at an) SDK...

[jducoeur]

I'm sure that they'd always planned for Safari to be there (their big selling point was always having a killer Web browser), but I honestly don't think they thought *of* it as a development platform.

From all the ducking and weaving they've done over the past few months (*especially* the near-complete blackout of any information to the development community), I believe that this was supposed to be Steve Jobs' dream closed platform -- all Apple, all the time. He's always been prone to that sort of thinking, and it looks to me that he had decided that cell phones were the place where he could get away with it, creating his object of crystalline beauty that no one else would go fiddle in.

AFAICT, they got seriously set back on their heels by the sheer outrage that came out of the rest of the computer community when they announced that it was going to be a closed box, and the "our platform is the Web" thing was pure reaction. Note the timeline: it took *weeks* after the criticism started before they even made the announcement, and they didn't actually develop anything -- they simply came up with spin on what they had already planned.

So no -- I really don't think this was planned as such, and that's why it was so poorly executed. I think that, once again, they got taken aback at the notion that there was a desire for outside software, and they're still trying to figure out how to deal with that...