Genero Mobile 1.0 – EAP now open
Irving, Texas – January 17, 2014— Four Js Development Tools announces the opening of its Early Access Program (EAP) for Genero Mobile – an important milestone in its history that marks its venture into Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms. Genero Mobile builds on twenty years’ experience in the server-centric world of mission-critical business applications and translates it to the world of Smartphones and tablets. In contrast to other vendors in this space, this enterprise pedigree enables Genero Mobile applications to scale with back-office services using the same technology.
Developers keen to get a head start in this exciting, emerging market are invited to sign up now. Advantages of the program include early access to new releases, direct technical liaison with the world-wide research and development centre and priority listings for new features. Genero Mobile launches late spring 2014. You are invited to participate in the kick-off webinar January 23, 2014.
Why Genero Mobile?
The rapid emergence of Smartphones and tablets in the enterprise is disrupting the desktop as the place where innovation takes place. The challenge with ‘mobile’ though is this: given the wide variety of incompatible platforms, what’s the best way to concentrate development effort to maximize profits and stay ahead of the competition? In short, the answer is to develop with Genero Mobile. Genero Mobile continues Four Js’ long tradition of improving developer productivity with a cross-platform development framework tailor-made for business applications.
A new breed of enterprise apps
In their bitter fight for market dominance, both Apple and Google have added special sensors and related APIs that enable dramatic innovation at the network’s edge. It’s not surprising then that a greater proportion of iOS and Android developers are rethinking applications than on any other platform. These developers are finding use cases that take advantage of these new capabilities: camera, video, voice recognition, geolocation, motion and proximity sensors, sharing and pairing, contacts, storage, calls and messaging. The arrival of high-bandwidth 4G networks will further accelerate demand for these features.
The problem is, to support these two platforms and the promise of these enticing features, developers using the vendors’ own tools need to code the same application twice. Not so with Genero Mobile.
Platform fragmentation
Today’s native development frameworks are completely proprietary – no code can be shared between platforms, creating total redundancy in the development lifecycle. Most developers are unable to support this increased cost and those that can, suffer time-to-market delays. Often, developers deal with this issue by compromising features, focusing on a primary platform. How do they decide though, which platform is primary and which is secondary? It may very well be different for each use case and each customer. Is the criteria highest unit volume (Android) or highest Internet usage (iOS)? Demand in the enterprise leans heavily towards iOS today, but will that trend persist?
The HTML5, CSS and Javascript movement presents an alternative solution by providing portability across a wide range of platforms. But this portability comes at the expense of lagging API support, a non-native user experience and tangible latency in user response times. What’s more, some HTML5 solutions need a network to operate finished apps.
Genero Mobile solves all of these shortcomings by providing a virtual machine that runs iOS and Android apps indifferently while delivering the native user experience with crisp performance. Device specific API calls are abstracted through a ‘frontcall’ mechanism that normalizes the code.
No need to choose
Genero Mobile frees the developer from having to choose between iOS and Android. What you develop for one, works on the other without modification. It does this by abstracting code and the user interface definition above proprietary hardware and operating system considerations. There is no need to compromise features between platforms; roadmaps and project plans are simplified and deadlines are shortened. Apps can also be quickly adapted to run on the desktop too.
Genero Studio is the visual programming environment that provides the framework needed for modeling the user interface, business logic workflow and sensor API access. No need for Xcode, Cocoa, ADT, Java, Javascript, CSS, HTML5 or Eclipse. That reduces the learning curve and increases developer productivity. Its unique model/data approach to development provides a purpose-built framework for business applications.
- A Dynamic Virtual Machine that executes Genero applications natively on iOS and Android,
- One codeset runs on iPhones, iPads and Android smartphones and tablets,
- A display model that seamlessly adapts forms to native iOS and Android ergonomics,
- Parallel dialogs for multi-touch access,
- Seamless access to SQLite,
- A client/server database connection and synchronization mechanism,
- Applications that execute without a network connection,
- Real-time, on-device debugging and previewing,
- Unicode UTF-8 character set support,
- Web Services and RESTful communication services through JSON,
- Genero Studio IDE for modeling applications.
The Genero Mobile Early Access Program is open to all Four Js customers with a valid maintenance agreement.
