Cross-Platform Development

Most installed applications are developed in C++ or .NET, and typically have large dependencies on Microsoft libraries and usually some third-party components. GUI is delivered via Microsoft APIs.

Most installed applications are developed in Objective-C and Swift, and use OSX’s in Cocoa library for GUI. The OSX is a certified POSIX compliant version of Unix, but it’s quite heavily customised.

Most installed applications are developed using the GNU C Compiler Collection, and use one of the two major UI toolkits, Qt or GTK, to manage the GUI parts of the application. Many applications are delivered to users as a source code bundle. Otherwise, they are compiled and packaged into distribution-specific “packages”, one for each of the major distros.

Implementing an application as a plain website is the simple option – it’s easy to make this work on all platforms. With AJAX (used to make websites more interactive) it becomes trickier – and more testing is required, but it’s quite possible.

Although Adobe is phasing it out, Flash is supported by all major OSes, and delivers very good cross-platform compatibility – a Flash app that works on one OS generally works on all. However, Flash programming is specialised, and many developers do not have the skills. It is rare to see major business apps developed in Flash, probably because it’s too difficult.

Mono is an open-source project coordinated by Xamarin and the Mono community that aims to make .NET applications run on Linux and Mac. Mono is very impressive, and is doing well on Linux, but unfortunately Mac support is weak. We believe it to be an acceptable option for delivering cross-platform .NET applications.

In this route, the core application is developed using portable C++ , and the application user interface is developed using native platform tools. This route allows common code to be shared while delivering a native style UI on each platform. Obviously this requires that the UI be written three times over. There are a number of strong cross-platform C++ libraries which can make the core code development easier, notably Boost++.

In this route, we use portable C++ and a portable graphics library. There are a number of graphics libraries which can be used for this – such as QT or GTK. This approach saves time, but generally means that the final applications will not have a “native” look and feel – Mac users in particular might think the application looks a little odd, although Qt looks like-for-like the same as Cocoa nowadays.