Last month, we told you about Iceberg, an application that allows anyone to be a developer by simplifying programming into a process that can be done via easy-to-use DIY tools. More recently, another company called Cascada Mobile launched a platform that does the same for the mobile world. With their new platform, Cascada Breeze, anyone can program mobile apps. This makes us wonder - is democratizing programming the next big trend for the future of the web?
With Cascada Mobile's platform called Breeze, anyone can take their idea from thought to app in about fifteen minutes. Well, maybe not anyone - the apps are built using HTML, so you would have to have some rudimentary web programming knowledge to use their platform. Still, you have to admit, that's a lot easier than using a professional development platform.
With Breeze, you can build, test, and distribute mobile J2ME apps that run on hundreds and handsets. And these are "real" apps, too - fully integrated mobile applications with their own icon, not just mobile widgets.
The "Breeze Simulator" lets the novice developers test their app for hundreds of different handsets - a usually daunting task in the world of mobile web programming where apps that work on one model don't work on another, even if they're similar in design or from the same manufacturer.
Check out this video that shows Breeze in action:
Cascada Mobile Breeze from Cascada Mobile on Vimeo.
In addition, Breeze developers will receive a line of code they can put on their web sites, blogs, or social network profiles that let their visitors download the app by entering their mobile number. Breeze takes care of the distribution via SMS, WAP Push, and direct download. To subsidize the cost of distribution, the apps are ad-enabled. However, developers wanting to go ad-free can pay for the use of Breeze in order to do so.
So, now we have an application that lets everyone program web apps (Iceberg) and a platform for building mobile J2ME apps, what's next? If this trend is to continue, the next big move would be to let novice developers build their own iPhone applications, you would think. But the real question is do we actually want amateurs building apps for our mobile devices? Or would you rather that was left to professionals?
You can try some Breeze applications for yourself from here. (Ooh, mobile Twitter!)
Comments
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I do believe programming should be democratized, but eliminating the act of writing code is not the way. The hard part about programming is taking a vague idea and turning it into a precise set of behaviors for the computer. As history shows (one quick example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4GL ), using pretty mouse-handled blocks instead of code doesn't fix the problem.
I've touched this subject myself not very long ago in a blog post ( http://my.opera.com/claudeb/blog/2008/04/03/demistyfy-programming ), which can be summarized in two sentences: programming used to be a democratic process when the typical PC was a Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64, and can be made democratic again by leveraging the one development platform available on every desktop nowadays - the web browser. I recommend Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent Javascript ( http://eloquentjavascript.net/ ). Once you get a taste for programming yourself, both MacOS X and Linux come out of the box with plenty of tools for going further with this noble activity.
One last remark: yes, making the switch from consumer to artisan takes hard work. There is no magic, people!
Posted by: Felix Pleşoianu | July 11, 2008 7:58 AM
testing
Posted by: Richard
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July 11, 2008 3:15 PM
Interesting points, (post #1). We have also referred to the market effect of our Breeze platform as "democratization," so we're glad to see others understand this point too. But the intent of Breeze is not to "eliminate the act of writing code." This platform still requires a developer to write HTML and JavaScript.
However Breeze picks up where mobile websites leave off, and gives a developer the ability to interact with the phone in a way that only an installed application can (access to the camera, sound player, local storage etc.) Independent developers face almost insurmountable challenges to create code that works across all the disparate devices and specs that exist in the mobile market today, even if these developers are proficient in J2ME.
But because of these challenges, the number of developers fluent in J2ME is dwarfed by the number of developers who are fluent in HTML and JavaScript (even though J2ME has been around for more than a decade). That circumstance is bad for the mobile industry. The democratization brought by the Breeze platform levels the playing field for developers by making it possible to easily create, test and port mobile applications that can work across a broad spectrum of mobile handsets; it just happens to accomplish this task without introducing a new language or a more complicated one (such as a proprietary XML-based language).
Posted by: Alan | July 14, 2008 12:48 PM
I tried twitter, so disppointed. It invoked mobile browser quite often, if so, why I need such a "Client"?
Posted by: forest | July 15, 2008 3:19 AM