[RESOLVED] Mobile apps written in php?

Joseph_Sliker

Hi;

Now that I can do a lot of stuff I need to do fairly comfortably in php (thanks to everyone's help here), once in a while I build mini/partial versions of some of my online apps that look/work okay in the internet browsers used in cell phones. Is this the same thing as creating a "mobile app"? (I suspect not.) What are the "big picture" differences between just a puny web page and a "real" mobile app?

I'm most familiar with Pocket PD/Windows Mobile devices (PDAs and phones with WiFi)...I'm too cheap to pay for iPhone and Android data subscriptions.

Can php be used to create buttons that can become part of a smartphone display for selecting apps?

...just wondering.

ixalmida

Mobile apps are typically written in Java. There isn't a PHP interpreter on any mobile phones that I'm aware of. Your mobile web page works because your web server interprets the PHP.

However, you can use Ajax in mobile pages to create interactive buttons for live data updates. Just be aware that not all phones with browsers support Ajax. Older Blackberry phones come to mind.

sneakyimp

A web page customized for display on a mobile device still requires the user to have a browser to view your page. A mobile app has its own icon in the list of apps and has a lot more power on the phone itself.

PHP scripts can only run if the machine you want to run them on has a PHP binary. This is kind of analgous to the web page / browser issue. You have to have a browser to interpret HTML. You have to have a PHP binary executable to interpret php script.

Mobile phone apps are not scripts (which require some kind of interpreter) but rather compiled executable files (and some supporting bits too probably) that are native to the mobile phone operating system. You generally write in Objective C for iPhones and in Java for Android phones and you use .NET or something for the Windows OS. The code you write lives in a project and you compile it into an executable and some supporting config files and it gets installed on the phone.

For the record, you can get an iPod touch and write apps for that and they should work on the iPhone.

sneakyimp

Also, I believe Adobe CS5 is supposed to allow export of your Actionscript projects (like Flash) directly into an iPhone-friendly package. Not certain of that.

There are free development tools available for iPhone and Android development. Try googling iPhone SDK or Android SDK.

Joseph_Sliker

Thanks for the replies. They were informative...enough so that at the moment I know I'm clearly out of my depth here and unlikely to have the time to get very far into this anytime soon. I guess I'll just stick with my puny web pages...they seem to work well enough and I don't have to even think about the cross-platform stuff.