Gluon For Mobile Developers
There is an increasing demand from companies to create mobile applications. In most cases, the mobile application needs to be connected to an existing enterprise system. Today, developers of mobile applications have a number of choices. They can create native applications, which means that they have to use native languages (Objective C or Swift on iOS, and Java on Android) in order to create a native application. While those native languages allow to provide a great user experience, they require special skills and at least 2 codebases.
Not only does native development require knowledge of two platforms, it also requires developers to track the evolution of these native languages and SDKs, as they move incredibly fast. Therefore, creating a mobile app is a relatively slow process, and maintaining it in a way that it works with new mobile devices or upgraded operating systems can quickly become very expensive.
An alternative approach to creating mobile applications is to use HTML web components and JavaScript frameworks. This makes it easier to share the same codebase amongst different target devices, but it is less trivial to access native functionality or to use the powerful native rendering mechanisms of the devices.
This is where Gluon has solutions that can drastically improve developer productivity.
One Language,
Multiple Platforms
Using Java on the client combines the advantage of a single codebase (Java) with easy access to native functionality and native rendering. Gluon Mobile makes it easy for Java developers to create and maintain this single codebase, and to deploy applications on iOS and Android devices. Under the hood, Gluon Mobile leverages the JavaFX API’s which use OpenGL to render user interfaces in a highly performant way. Gluon Mobile comes with a set of controls that follow the Google Material Design specification, and therefore work very well on mobile devices. Finally, Gluon Mobile provides an abstract API to access device-specific functionality (e.g. location service, access to the camera, etc).
Building The UI
The user interface needed for those mobile applications can be created using Gluon Scene Builder, or it can be programmatically created using the users preferred IDE with the help of the Gluon IDE plugins. With more than half a million downloads, Gluon Scene Builder is a proven and mature product that allows designers and developers to create a user interface using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Enterprise Connectivity
In order to link mobile functionality to new or existing back-end systems, Gluon Mobile makes it easy to access functionality exposed as web services. For a seamless and controlled integration with enterprise back-end and cloud systems, it is recommended to use Gluon CloudLink as a back-end component. Gluon Mobile contains client API’s that allows the mobile developer to communicate with Gluon CloudLink in order to access enterprise functionality that requires specific security protocols or access policies.
Next Steps...
Gluon CloudLink
Enable enterprise and mobile developers to easily connect their disparate services and apps together, enabling bi-directional communications between mobile apps, enterprise infrastructure, and cloud systems.
Gluon Mobile
Create iOS & Android apps using the latest Java 8 features. Build one application using one set of cross-platform APIs, and deploy to all platforms. Using Gluon, you can massively improve time-to-market for your apps.