In 2008, after Steve Jobs released a Software Development Kit (SDK)for developing iPhone application, the iPhone OS platform became open for all to development their own application. Xcode is the development environment for iPhone development. Later a lot of frameworks were introduced over this platform. The following are new platforms for developing iPhone applications.
iPhone SDK
An SDK for iPhone development is released on 6th March 2008. using this SDK, developer can develop application is iPhone and iTouch devices. It came up with an iPhone simulator to test application. SDK requires Apple Developer Licence to launch application on any iPhone device. like Mac operating system, iPhone OS also based on Xcode. the main components of this SDK are:
- Cocoa Touch
- Media
- Core Services
- OS X kernal
MonoTouch
MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices, while taking advantage of the iPhone APIs and reusing both code and libraries that have been built for .NET, as well as existing skills. (MonoTouch, 2009).
PhoneGap
PhoneGap basically generates native wrappers for what are still web apps. What PhoneGap provides beyond that is a bridge between JavaScript and native device APIs. so, you write JavaScript against PhoneGap APIs, and PhoneGap then makes the appropriate corresponding native call. in that respect, it is different from deploying a plain old web app. (Stackoverflow, 2009).
Corona
Corono is web based application development for iPhone-based devices. It supports html, javascipt, action script (flash) and a good platform for highly graphic basic applications , games etc. This is very latest platform in iPhone development world and the team releases daily updates on this SDK. Research on increasing graphic speed and flash based application integration in iPhone is progress with the Corona team. This platform is not free. A limited feature trail version is available for free. for full SDK, you need to spend 99 dollars.
Appcelerator
Appcelerator Titanium is an open source platform for developing mobile and desktop applications using web technologies. Appcelerator Titanium is frequently compared to Adobe Air for developing desktop applications for Windows, Mac and Linux. the tool can deploy standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and Linux from any of those platforms. It does this by submitting the source files to a proprietary server-side solution which then returns the binaries. However, to develop an iPhone application using this tool you need a Mac Os and iPhone SDK.