Steve Jobs announced today that Apple's iPhone will support third-party Web 2.0 applications when it begins shipping on June 29. While not totally unexpected, this approach opens the floodgates in a way that a standard "Cocoa-based" API would not.
To quote, "Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps."
As I said, this approach blows the floodgates wide open, as there are probably millions of people out there right now with the skills and knowledge needed to create rich applications for the iPhone.
No Cocoa. No Java. No new languages. Just a little AJAX (HTML and JavaScript and CSS), some images, and most likely a few "built-in" script libraries to handle the custom functions mentioned above. Probably handled much in the same way as when developing Apple Dashboard widgets.
It opens the platform to third party development, while providing a Safari-based sandbox that gives the platform and network the security and stability it needs.
To that end, they also announced a Windows-based version of Safari that's supposedly much faster than IE7 (no trick there) and FireFox. While I'm not sure how many Windows users will switch browsers, they've also given just Windows DEVELOPERS access to Webkit and the tools needed to create iPhone applications.
And what do highly-functional web-enabled applications need? Access to backend data, of course. (Insert obligatory ColdFusion reference here.)
While that goes without saying, I think this points a rather strong finger in the direction of software development. Because if one can do super-interactive applications with a little AJAX and an embedded browser, do we need complex systems like Flash and Flex?
And does this validate Apollo?
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