Javascript can be hard to maintain
Let’s face it, Javascript is both a powerful and flexible language, but developing and maintaining large scale projects in a dialect not really designed for it is frustrating. The reason javascript libraries like jQuery, jQTouch and Sencha have remained more or less unrivaled for years now – is first and foremost because of the monumental effort involved.
The key factor itself have to do with the actual language. Javascript is a fantastic language, but sadly it lacks many of the traditional programming concepts native to languages like C++ and object pascal. Concepts like classes, true object inheritance, interfaces and type casting – techniques and technology created exactly for the purpose of making large frameworks manageable and robust.
Changing the game
With Smart Mobile Studio however you can take full advantage of these classical concepts. This is because our product allows you to write ordinary, classical object pascal (made famous by Delphi, Free-pascal or other incarnations of the language) and it’s instantly converted into super charged javascript.
The compiler at the heart of Smart generates javascript in a way that implements all the aforementioned technologies. So even if javascript itself doesn’t support concepts like interfaces, it is crafted by the compiler in javascript itself. And if you are worrying about speed – you will find that even with all these powerful and classical technologies – Smart Mobile Studio can run with the best of them. To make it plain: Smart does for the browser what Delphi did for the Windows platform.
You also get an IDE (integrated development environment) specifically designed for Smart programming
Write pascal, compile to javascript
Easy to use, easy to learn and very rewarding
If you haven’t used pascal before then don’t worry. It was designed to be taught in school to students of object oriented software development. Chances are you have already used it yourself or have heard about Delphi or Free-pascal from a co-worker. Object pascal is responsible for hundreds of thousands of applications in the Windows world – and it’s still knocking out killer apps today.
Easy to use doesn’t make it a lightweight in terms of features however. Object pascal is fast, dynamic, robust and can do pretty much everything C++ can do.
With Smart you can now take your knowledge of classical programming one step further – into the domain of super fast HTML5 web applications. You can also use third party products like Phonegap and compile your generated web app into a real, binary executable program – ready for app-store. In fact, only hours after Smart was released to it’s testers, demo projects made it’s way onto the Android marketplace (!)
So what would you rather maintain? 10.000 lines of javascript code or 1000 lines of pascal code to achieve the same thing? Object pascal is a proven, tested by time and established language designed to handle large scale projects. Javascript is not. The benefits of using a compiler that generates javascript are just to great to ignore.