... said Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook decision to drop HTML5 and go native on mobile platforms. Although they will not use our favorite tool, I see it as yet another chance for Lazarus to ride this new wave...
Well, there's native and then there's native. For example, does "native" mean simply compiled code (Objective-C)? Or does it mean using the native UI framework (Cocoa Touch) directly - that is, without a slab of cross-platform code on top of it? Or does it mean something else?
The title of Dan Dilger's AppleInsider piece is not supported by what he reports. That is, I don't see anything in the piece that indicates what Zuck means by "native". So I dug a bit deeper. Here's what Facebook's engineering manager was saying a year ago, an actual transcript, not just isolated quotes:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobile-was-design.phpIn Fetterman's words, here were the 3 problems they had to solve when creating a PhoneGap-like Facebook app:
(1) "it doesn't look native"
(2) "it is not going to feel native"
(3) "it isn't fast enough"
As he expands on this, clearly it's not really a question of simply compiled vs. JavaScript, but rather how do you simulate in a cross-platform way all the good stuff that the underlying native Cocoa Touch frameworks provide, in order to avoid writing your app multiple times for different platforms?
Obviously they failed at this attempt and have gone back to writing a lot of code specific to each platform. So I wouldn't say this is much of an endorsement of, say, LCL or FireMonkey, which attempt to hide the platform-specific UI details.
Thanks.
-Phil
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