Titanium development platform
There are occasions that desktop application become required as part of a project. To me, as a PHP application developer, this is almost impossible. PHP is a scripting language used by the web. Desktop application and PHP almost do not link at all.
Until recently I came across the Titanium solution. It bridges the gap between PHP and the native OS platform. With Titanium, I can enjoy building desktop, even mobile, applications using the technology that I am comfortable with. That is build desktop and mobile applications with PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Sounds familiar? That’s right! We can now utilise the whole web development technology to build desktop apps. Just like Adobe Air, minus the learning curve of flash, actionscripts, etc. Having said this, PHP just became supported by Titanium. So things are just shaping out, but I believe we should have a very workable platform once Titanium comes out of its beta.
The lack of PHP support might not be an issue if we think about application design. The desktop application we build might just be a thin client, which acts as a browser replacement. It might be a good practice to actually keep all the complex domain logic on the web/application server. We could then use the SOA approach to make thin client functional by calling exposed web service methods by the server.
Anyway, we should definitely keeping an eye on this one! http://www.appcelerator.com/
What’s next? I’m having a break from my freelancing works at the moment. I’m actually waiting for my Ruby on Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, to arrive (Right! I’m self-learning RoR). Amazon seems to be running out of stock on this particular one … Luck that I borrowed a book from a good friend of mine last night. It’ll keep me busy for a while, and my friend has got another book that I’ll borrow and read (Currently have “Domain-Driven Design” by Eric Evans, and “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” by Martin Fowler is on the list).
Hopefully I should be able to talk something about the “Domain-Driven Design” book in my next post. Keep tuned!!!
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