On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Any thoughts? Wildly in favor or against?
From Brion's original email as well as my
perspective from being involved
in these projects, I am in favor of shifting to
native code for iOS and
Android. Considering the goals of the mobile team for 2012/2013 [1] include
building contributory features (beyond basic editing and even beyond just
uploading photos [and while certainly some mobile devices have terrible
cameras, many have exceptional cameras]), the fact that we've been thinking
about contributory pipelines that involve multiple devices, and the fact
that we've had headaches building contributory features using Cordova,
shifting to a native codebase for the most used mobile platforms makes a
LOT of sense.
One argument that could be made against shifting to a native codebase for
the android/iOS apps is that of accessibility to our engineering community.
The great thing about Cordova is the fact that 99% of what you need to know
to dive in is HTML and JS. However, we do have Java devs and Objective C
devs in the community - and creating more things in those language could
also help attract other engineers who like to focus on that kind of stuff
into our community. Overall, I think the benefits far outweigh the
potential drawbacks.
[1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Mobile
--
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687