Tie Mobile Information across Boundaries

I have been working for some time now to learn the ins and outs of creating new mobile applications on the major platforms.  As someone still new to all of it, I have to stumble through the differences and learn the nuances that come with each one.  Each has things that make life easier, and others that make it harder.  This, as expected, can cause some irritations.  In this process, I did stumble across at least one way to make creating cross platform apps a bit more connected, JSON files.

My first experiment was to create an extension for chrome.  Being a web developer, this was not overly difficult as it’s basically just a mini web page with a different packaging system.  The project was to create a company directory for Sundog.  Simple, not overly hard to create, and easy to recreate in each device.  Instead of simply hard coding all the values, I decided to use a JSON call to allow for update on the fly.  This way, I could add/subtract entries by simply changing the JSON file, not doing a full update.

When I moved to creating this as an Android app, it was only logical that I use the same file to drive the Droid application.  The Droid platform was able to handle the JSON file just as easily as any website could using JS.  I could now update that single JSON file and update both the chrome extension and the Droid app.

A co-worker created a prototype on the Windows 7 system while another is in the process of creating the same thing for the iOS.  Each running off the exact same JSON file to populate the employee information.

This may not work for every app that is out there, but the idea is the same.  With mediums like JSON, we can get around having multiple copies with slight variants for each platform.  We can tie them all together to ensure consistency of the information we display.