Talk on dynamic Android apps at SWDC2010

I will be giving a talk on dynamic languages on Android at the Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2010. It goes without saying that I am proud of being invited to speak at this high-profile conference. I am looking forward to Marcus Ahnve talking about TDD and Android, and to Nikolai Onken's talk on accessing hardware from the browser, to name a few.

It is interesting to note that after years of having a trend towards browser based applications, the popularity of iPhone and Android has shifted focus back to "fat clients" in the form of mobile apps. Obviously, native apps have the potential for a richer user interface experience than what is possible with today's browser based apps.

But mobile apps tend to be a bit heavy going. In the case of iPhone, this is especially noteworthy. Not only is there a substantial development cycle (edit, compile, run) for native apps, Apple's notorious process for accepting apps to the app store stretches the deployment cycle to the magnitude of weeks.

Android development and deployment is quite smooth, thanks to the Eclipse plugin for Android, and to the fact that one can easily and legally deploy the app on any web site (you are not restricted to Android Market). Still there is some effort involved in deploying and installing new versions of an app. And the development process is still based on the build centric edit-compile-run cycle.

When it comes to web development, there is no need to rebuild and redeploy the application on every edit-run cycle. Thanks to JavaScript being a dynamic language, you can edit and reload only the part that has been updated. A web application is also trivial to deploy and upgrade (ahem, well in theory that is ;-).

In my talk at SWDC2010, I will discuss how dynamic languages like JavaScript can be used as a basis for a platform where applications can be deployed and updated with the same ease as for browser based applications. Furthermore, I will discuss how to take advantage of the dynamic nature of JavaScript for incremental development of applications, and demo the interactive editor in DroidScript, which is a simplistic but illustrative example of a Smalltalk inspired programming tool for Android.