The debate about opting for native development versus using cross platform development tools like PhoneGap, Xamarin, Titanium etc., is a perennial one in mobile app development. As with virtually everything in tech, every option has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Parse’s announcement that it will be winding down has surely come down as an unfortunate surprise to a lot of app developers especially indie developers who found the holy grail in Parse. Lot of well known apps have been written with Parse as a backend and there are still quite a few apps with millions of installations that are using Parse as the backend. It appears that Facebook has mercilessly pulled the rug from under these app developers.
Why was a Swift developer arrested on the beach?
Because he thought clothing was optional.
Traditionally, we have all dealt with variables as having some value at any point in time during the execution of the program and use them assuming they will contain some value.
Error handling is one of the fundamental concepts of programming. A program without error handling is like a country without a justice system. Your app will behave in an unruly manner with no one to bring order to the program.Any programmer worth his salt should handle errors in his/her code.
Tech folks will agree that Unit testing and test driven development is a good concept but is seldom practiced. Its usefulness and importance is much eulogised by doyens like Bob Martin, Kent Beck et al.
We often use 3rd party libraries (both paid and free) in our projects to reduce development time and increase app functionality. This practice has served pretty well so far and will continue to assist in programming.
Back in 2010, Google introduced C2DM (Cloud to Device Messaging) as a way to push messages from cloud to Android powered devices. This service was eventually replaced by GCM (Google Cloud Messaging). C2DM is now deprecated & the service will be shut down completely on 20 Oct 2015.
A best practice in any given successful agile development project is the use of continuous integration (CI). CI ensures automatic execution of various test harnesses when developers commit their work (source code) to version control systems.
We are happy to share articles pertaining to programming, coding and related topics in our new series: Tech Talk. This week’s article is about NSURLSession vs NSURLConnection, written by Dhanaraj, Software Architect.
Often times we find ourselves in a situation wherein the project has to be configured to make use of different provisioning profile and signing certificates and also with different bundle identifiers. The source code is maintained in a distributed and the vendor and the client make their own builds using their respective profiles, certificates and app ids.
