Monday, July 11, 2011
Real-time development
I read this great article on Develop-Online. You guys have probably figured out that I am a HUGE fan of iterative development. What really drove the concept home for me is the fact that I have been working on a Blackberry app for work and I am doing it in Java. The problem with Java development on the Blackberry is that you run your code in simulators that take forever to startup and load the app. There are ways to reduce this time, but when compared with Blackberry Webworks development, it is a huge time waster. In Webworks, there is a browser based simulator named Ripple that allows you to redeploy an app by simply hitting the refresh button in the browser. ShiVa functions along the same lines because you can run the game in the IDE on-the-fly. You don't have long compile times or a long wait while the simulator loads. More than anything else, that has been the single most important feature in ShiVa and makes development so much easier.
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Actually there is a difference, the simulator simulates the behavior of devices while the emulator emulates the behavior of the device. In other words, the emulator acts like a real device (you start the whole operating system on your PC - "as a guest"), the buttons work, you can run applications, etc., the simulator only shows how your game should look on the real device and nothing more. I'm sure that you know this but I wrote for those who wonder why the emulation is so slow.
ReplyDeleteBoba
Good point! And as you can tell from my wording, I often forget the distinction. I will also add that in many cases when developing for Blackberry, I am forced to test in an emulator because I need support for hardware devices that are not available in a simulator and there are even cases in which the emulator is insufficient(bluetooth). I can only assume the same will be true of ShiVa development. At some point we will need to test it out on an emulator and finally on real devices.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment!
Indeed, the emulator is here because we can not have all the available devices, with iOS situation is not so terrible (except price, iphone is overrated in my opinion) but the android platform runs on over 300 different devices. If we consider the Bada and WebOS we can easily go over 400 devices. Will be necessary to perform testing on a real device, but I think this is the last stage in development.
ReplyDeleteBoba