In addition to various ways of running a Racket VM on Android/iOS/etc.
devices, another way to use Racket in mobile device app development is
to target HTML5 offline apps. This means dynamic HTML+CSS UI, offline
application cache and updating, persistent local storage, etc.
A client of mine has recently been very successful in adding a
device-independent mobile app to its large system, by having Racket code
generate the HTML and JS from existing specification data of desktop
forms. An algorithm is used to convert positional-based large layout
specs to mobile-friendly (pardon the lame buzzword) ``Responsive
Design'' layouts that work on tablets and smartphones.
HTML5 apps right now are not for the faint of heart, if you're an
engineer who knows what is and is not robust, rather than a median Web
designer/programmer who doesn't know any better, but it can be done.
Once you do it, you have an app that works on many different devices,
can double as a desktop Web site, doesn't need to be distributed through
an app store (just visited once in a browser), and is on track with the
Web-centric direction that apps are hopefully heading (away from the
current tangent of once again being tied to a particular platform).
I'd like to see Racket code compile to HTML5 apps someday.
Neil V.
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