I’ve got some apps on the cards, my target platform of choice is Android, however I’m aware that there are some SDK’s around advertising the ability to write once and deploy to multiple mobile Operating Systems. One such seems to be Marmalade.
This product in particular claims compilation to native code per device to achieve compatibility. What I’d like to know, before i commit to the price tag, or even developing outside the manufacturers intended frameworks – is peoples thoughts on the matter.
Compilation to native code would assumedly have high performance, however I am guessing there’s a tradeoff where you lose easy access to all of the API’s provided by google/apple, etc.
Looking for any other pros/cons and whether or not people who went with something like marmalade hit road blocks, wished they had not made the move.
My apps will not require a 3d engine, which seem to make up the bulk of the sample apps on the marmalade showcase. My apps will however generally want to store quite a lot of relational data & hit web services, so convenient access to sql compact would be nifty.
I work at Marmalade caveat.
The solution that we provide offers high performance because it does not rely on a virtual machine like other cross platform solutions do.
Additionally you can use native APIs directly using our EDK (Extension Developer Kit) that allows you to package up calls to native calls on iOS and Android. So you need not miss out on these.
Take a look at this blog by one of our developers who has taken his game across a whole bunch of platforms with little effort using Marmalade http://www.drmop.com/
For the last comment, we do provide sqlite support through our open source modules.