CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cross-platform
Don Jones
Don Jones

Reputation: 9497

Best language for cross-platform logic engine?

I need to write a logic engine for an application. Essentially, this thing is going to be fed a bunch of data in an XML file, and it then crunches that data and produces an XML file as its result.

The trick is that this engine will need to run on a server (probably Windows, and probably as a background service) AND it will need to on mobile devices - iOS and Android, primarily.

The logic isn't that awfully difficult or complex. On the mobile devices, the idea is to give researchers quick-and-dirty access to the engine for very tiny data sets. The server "version" will do exactly the same work, but do it on huge data sets.

The GUI will be abstracted from this logic engine.

I should point out that the "mobile version" should be able to work offline - meaning that whatever I choose to implement this logic engine in, it needs to run natively on the devices. THAT said, it's perfectly fine for it to run in the mobile device's local Web browser in a locally-stored file. For example, I'd originally considered JavaScript for this - except I don't think there's a way to have JavaScript running in a multi-threaded service on the server side of things.

Is there a single language that offers to do this? With a minimum of re-coding between platforms?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 308

Answers (3)

Ben Voigt
Ben Voigt

Reputation: 283893

You can use Rhino to execute JavaScript from inside a Java server/servlet. I'm not sure how parallel/threaded the engine is. You can also look into hosting Google V8, which probably will be higher performance/more scalable.

Upvotes: 1

mikera
mikera

Reputation: 106401

Java (or another JVM language like Scala, Clojure or Groovy) is the closest you can do: it's the single platform that allows compiled code to be run unchanged on the largest range of platforms.

However I'm not sure how good Java support is on iOS - this might be the tricky one. But this is going to be a problem in any case: Apple don't seem particularly keen on encouraging anything other than their own tools.

Perhaps the best strategy is to write in Java (which will cover your servers and 95% of your client platforms) and then have a small client side portion that you can quickly port for special cases like iOS.

Upvotes: 0

Gabriel
Gabriel

Reputation: 3045

I don't think you can do all of this (you probably can, but it wouldn't be very pretty) in one language.

Upvotes: 0

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