Today the Gluon engineering team signed off on our first developer preview release of Gluon Mobile. This release is intended to gather user feedback and bug reports that will be used to guide future developer preview releases, ultimately culminating in the first 1.0.0 release of Gluon Mobile. Post any feedback you may have to our support forums, or if you want to keep your thoughts private, you can contact us privately.
What is Gluon Mobile?
The way we describe it is:
The Gluon Mobile library takes care of all the grunt work, so you can focus on the important aspects of your code.
Our Gluon Mobile library can massively improve time-to-market for applications, by providing APIs for modern ‘material design’ user interfaces, accessing mobile device features, connecting to web services, and synchronizing state across many devices.
Let’s take each of these statements in turn:
Firstly, by using the Gluon Mobile ‘Charm Glisten’ APIs, you can easily create modern, ‘material design’ user interfaces using our custom UI controls, CSS styling, and advanced APIs for mobile user interfaces.
Secondly, the Gluon Mobile ‘Charm Down’ functionality allows for cross-platform access to hardware features found on different platforms (regardless of whether the platform is Android, iOS, or a desktop platform). This standard API for file access, hardware functionality, etc means you don’t have to worry about what platform you’re running on – you can access the hardware in a standard way.
Finally, Gluon Mobile ‘Charm Connect’ provides APIs to reach out to web services, as well as the Gluon Cloud service. Speaking of Gluon Cloud, with the release of this developer preview of Gluon Charm, we are also opening Gluon Cloud in private beta form. To make use of the Gluon Cloud, you should go to the private beta registration form. Gluon Cloud allows you to store and synchronise application data between all your clients. The Charm Connect APIs allow you to take advantage of this.
For more developer-targeted details on how to use these APIs, refer to the Gluon Docs website. If you find yourself with questions, refer to the Gluon HQ forums.
Isn’t Gluon Mobile a commercial product?
Yes, it will be, but for developer preview release and early user testing, we’re opening the doors to everyone. The only thing you’ll notice with this release is a rather painless nag screen that shows up every time an application written with Gluon Mobile starts up.
We aren’t quite ready to announce details about licensing and pricing, but keep an eye on this website (or our Twitter stream), and you’ll be the first to know.
Getting Gluon Mobile
Gluon Mobile is available solely via our public nexus server. To prevent information on this blog from becoming stale, rather than mention the details here, please go to the Gluon Mobile page, and it will always list the very latest instructions on how to add a Gluon Mobile dependency to your project.
Concluding Remarks
We are very happy to finally get our Gluon Mobile library released. Please remember that this is a very early developer preview of what is coming. We plan to iterate rapidly based on your feedback.
Finally, here is our Gluon Glisten teaser trailer. Glisten is a sub-component of Gluon Mobile, so it is now available for you to test.