My Vision of the future mobile platform framework

Develop a mobile application is painful, develop a portable mobile application is really hard. I've been a mobile developer for many years, and I am struggling many years to make them portable to different platforms. To deal with fragmentation, which is the nature of mobile platform, my vision of the future mobile platform framework would be:

Support multiple platforms
support J2ME, iPhone, android, blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc. One solution supports multiple platform, which will makes our life much easier.  I hope new new framework will provide a more abstraction layer, then developer can only write one piece of code can support all.

Separation of concerns
- Separate platform independent logic from platform specific logic
- Separate application logic from specific user interface
The platform specific logic should be encapsulated as component modules, and developer should not care more about their details. Think about the IC and drivers, our mobile application is like a computer mother board which plug different cards and installing different drivers.
The concept of separation of concern reminds me of how GIS works, GIS map is composed of maps in different layer, each layer map focuses on a specific concern, same as the mobile application, the mobile app will be composed of different layers, UI layer, business logic layer, model layer, etc. And each layer can be easily modified and plug-in. Then graphic designer can focus UI, generate the rendering logic; BA focuses on business rules, generate business logic, then developer integrate them all into one application, and each layer can be easily changed and upgraded.

Easy to customization
The mobile framework should takes the advantage of different platforms technologies. we should not do the way of common denominator, like J2ME MIDP widget, which is a bad example.

Open and easy to integrate with other libraries
The new mobile platform should be open to other framework or library, it should be easily to integrate with other libraries. for example, developer can integrate different UI libray easily, like LWUIT, SVG, oepnGL, etc. and the mobile platform does not want to reinvent the wheels, it focuses on integration.

Follow agile
The mobile framework should be agile, which means
- support TDD, provide a mobile unit test framework or support 3rd party test framework
- Encourage short feedback, the mobile framework provides powerful simulator which can simulate different platforms, developer can easily to know what is going on for his application, and it is also a good demo and presentation to our costumer, the simulator can be run inside the browser so that it is a good demo for end users.
- provide build and deploy automation, since different platform has different SDK and build tools, manage them is a nightmare, having a build automation tool will greatly improve the developer's productivity and speed up the application development cycle.


Several possible technical paths:
- DSL/Code generation 
  Define a mobile Domain Specific Language,  then generate the native source code for different platform. we can use Ruby or ANTLR. I like the idea of code generation, because it can meet the needs of different platform, and can easily to implement the AOP

- Use web based script languages
  Using html, xml, CSS, java script, then render in the browser or using parser to generate the native source code. This is also a good concept, actually there are already have several open source project doing like this, for example PhoneGap,but what I really worry about are: 1) How to address the fragmentation for each platform; 2) to solve the question 1, may leads to common denominator issue. For this reason, I really doubt the JavaFX Mobile framework, because there is no way to handle the fragmentation issue in script language level.
 
I hope in the near future, I can do something for the new mobile platform. I have a dream, in future: UI designer, BA, developer and QA will share the same framework, each works on his own part, then developer integrates them by pressing a button, then generate mobile applications for different platforms, hope this won't take long.