Re:How Google Inbox shares 70% of its code across Android, i...
by Zigurd on Thursday February 05, 2015 @05:01PM
(#9006436)
> I tried to use j2objc and I thought it was the biggest POS.
GWT was also an idea whose time had not yet come. I'm sure that the success of InBox makes the developers forget some of the blood, sweat and tears it probably took to toolsmith a cross-platform architecture. But they took a conservative approach, sticking to networking, sync, and local persistence. They picked parts of the app that would be using similar-enough APIs on all platforms that the abstractions don't get out of hand, and the learning curve for maintainers isn't too steep.
If I was looking at a big-enough project to justify the toolsmithing, I would be looking at how they did this.
GWT was also an idea whose time had not yet come. I'm sure that the success of InBox makes the developers forget some of the blood, sweat and tears it probably took to toolsmith a cross-platform architecture. But they took a conservative approach, sticking to networking, sync, and local persistence. They picked parts of the app that would be using similar-enough APIs on all platforms that the abstractions don't get out of hand, and the learning curve for maintainers isn't too steep.
If I was looking at a big-enough project to justify the toolsmithing, I would be looking at how they did this.