Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
You can also read the blog via Twitter or your phone via wap.abiro.com. See the left menu for more news.
Comments on blog entries are moderated, but I'm rather liberal as long as it's not blatant advertising.
For general comments, advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Bada, anotha’ smartphone platform
Samsung introduced Bada late last year. It’s both a platform and a programming language, where the platform itself can run on Linux or other kernels, hinting it could also run in less powerful phones.
Bada will directly compete with Android, that Samsung is putting a lot of efforts into as well, and introducing a new programming language is not at all wise in my opinion.
Except for the learning curve (which is not major for a new language, the key issue is to learn to use the platform APIs and UI paradigm) a big problem within mobile applications is portability, and if not even core functionality can be ported easily, even less so code accessing system and UI functionality, then it adds considerable cost to each project that is to run on Bada as well.
Embedded access to Flash and WebKit is nice, making it very easy to access advanced animation and web pages from within applications, but is this different from Android and iPhone? iPhone doesn’t have Flash yet, but I guess that’s just a matter of time,
I’m by no means a fan of C++, as it’s a hacked together language with most of the C’s no-no’s still remaining: buffer overflows due to no array checking and memory leaks due in part to no garbage collection and manual de-allocation etc. In end-user applications, the gain you get from proper range checking and object handling overshadows possible efficiency drawbacks by far, something Windows developers have learned when moving from C++ to C#.
Registration as a Bada developer is free, so check it out. There’s plenty of documentation at the site, that I haven’t even begun to dig through yet. I’m sure more will be revealed later, and also Samsung’s intentions with Bada vs Android, and possible links in between.
