Re: iWhatever Development

[John Passaniti <john@...>]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Louis-Philippe <default@spiralix.org> wrote:
> about extending corona:
> from: http://developer.anscamobile.com/forum/2010/04/08/os-40-and-corona-sdk
> "This raises an excellent question: what should be the Corona philosophy? In
> other words, if you are a skilled enough programmer to handle the microphone
> API, or extend the Corona internals, is there an advantage to you in using
> Corona? This is meant as a point for further discussion, as there are pros
> and cons either way. I'd like to hear your views."

Here is my view.

Corona is interesting to me because it *isn't* just a wrapper around
the Apple APIs.  What they have is an abstraction layer that insulates
the programmer from the slings and arrows of both the iWhatever and
Android platforms.  And as I'm new to both iWhatever and Android
platforms, I see it as tremendously valuable that I don't have to go
through the same painful discovery process in not only porting Lua to
the platform, but coming up with nice abstraction layer for the UI,
media, and other services.  That to me is 90% of what my application
will need, and why I have an interest in Corona.  I see that for $99,
I can leverage the experience of others on platforms that are new to
me.  What's not to love?

But in my applications, also I need access to the underlying
platform's APIs.  My ideas for applications simply can't be done
without them.  Now I could certainly code the whole thing natively in
Objective C and have access to everything.  But that takes me down a
road of reinventing the wheel that Corona already has.  And their
wheel is nice.  My initial wheel is likely to be wobbly.

The thread you posted has one of the Ansca people saying that there
are "significant support issues" for making Corona extensible.  I
can't see why.  They can offer the hook(s) I want and say, "if you use
this, you're on your own."  That would be perfectly acceptable.