We have just released two mobile applications backed by Plone, WordPress and Python middleware code. In this blog post I’ll tell some background information what we have learnt with mobile applicationand Python development.

mFabrik News – download now for iPhone and Android

1. Why create a mobile application?

The first question is why one rather create a mobile application when the same task can be accomplished with a mobile site? Most people even prefer mobile sites over applications. From a pure engineering viewpoint, mobile applications are usually just glorified RSS readers that embed Webkit and add some native user interface bling bling over it. With an app, you are limiting your target audience, because an application is limited to one platform. Maintaining application(s) and application developers is more expensive compared to a mobile site which few (cheap) PHP junkies can throw together.

But is not always technology or price which matters. Mobile applications have prestige value – having or showing success, rank, wealth, etc. If you have a high quality brand, you probably want to have a mobile application too. When you see the brand logo swinging forth and back in an iPhone application with smooth animation running 60 frames per second, you see that it is a proper placement for the brand logo. The output is more luxury, more carefully planned, and does not look like it was thrown together by few cheap web developers.

There are even rationale reason for going after applications. First, you are in a business of making money. It is a lot of easier when the platform itself is offering you a payment solution without a monthly fees (iTunes payment). Other good reason is that there exists interaction between the application and your content beyond the browser window.  You can push messages or do things even if the user is not on your site (see more information about the push solution we implemented below).

2. Mobile application development and Python

As most of this post readers are probably fellow Python developers, here are some thoughts specifically aimed for them. Python itself is not a very good alternative what comes to mobile application development. Though, the application itself may not contain Python code, Python still shines on the backend side of the things. For example, we’ll hope to publish an example application using Google App Engine in the near future.

The only future proof platform where Python is 1st class citizen for building applications, is Nokia’s Meego with its Pyside and Qt bindings. Unfortunately Meego doesn’t have any shipped handsets and looks like it never will.

Android has script bindings, but they are not good enough for real application development, as interaction with the native platform happens over TCP/IP sockets. However, Android has seen some recent exciting development from PyPy project, possibly enabling native Android development for Python in the future.

iOS with Python could be a go, now when Apple has lift ban on interpreted languages. I haven’t heard anybody doing it yet, though. CTypes had some problems long time ago regarding run-time generated code for Python bindings.

Python has also a port for Series 60 (Symbian) – don’t go there if you are not prototyping. It is good platform for students for  playing around, but unfortunately it has never been considered as serious development environment by the handset manufacturer. You have tons of headaches if you actually want to release a product version of your application.  Nokia N900, soon supported. is better prototyping platform for Python than Series 60 as you get full Debian userland.

3. Mobile application development and wrappers

There exist various wrapper technologies which help you to wrap your HTML5 application to a native application shell. With simplistic APIs provided through Javascript bindings, you can access a limited subset of native platform APIs. Wrapper technologies are mostly aimed for web developers, who do not have any experience on application development and they might want to skip the learn experience of native development.

Wrapper technologies do their job and produce decent apps. But if you are a Python developer I recommend you skip the wrapper step and build your own native user interface and embed Webkit yourself. Designing an user interface is much is easier with Apple’s Interface Builder or Google’s  Android tools than with half-baked Javascript bindings. The fact that you are actually able to insert a real breakpoint into your code is itself worth of skipping wrappers. If you already are a Python developer you already know at least one real programming language and mastering Objective-C or Java should be an easy task for you.

Webkit itself has bugs. You will regularly hit obscrure bugs when the amount of  Javascript and CSS code grows. In the worst cases Webkit just dies under your application without a way to debug the problem – sometimes without a workaround available for the problem. This means dead end for your lovely application. You don’t want to end up to this situation. So, just to have more low level control, using native tools is good.

4. mFabrik News application

mFabrik News mobile application allows you to follow the latest news of mobile and web development, produced by our hacking team. The applications source the news from our Plone based web site and WordPress blog (which you are currently reading). It uses special RSS streams prepared with our Web and Mobile multichannel publishing solution: news images are optimized for mobile device screens using a handset database (Wurfl) and some other HTML preproessing is done to make the posts look better in embedded WebKit. Processing is done using mobile.sniffer and mobile.htmlprocessing Python packages which are generic Python packages and should be usable in various environments, including App Engine.

iOS mFabrik News application has push notification support. Android doesn’t yet implement push solution, but it is coming for Android 2.2 handsets.  Please see the earlier blog post how we use Apple Push Notifications with Python.

Download, give the apps a spin and report any feedback! (direct links at the beginning of the post)

We may or may not release the source code of the applications, depending if anybody thinks they actually would find it useful.

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