Cross-Platform Development

Cross-Platform Development

What does Cross-Platform Development mean?

Cross-platform development is the practice of developing software products or services for multiple platforms or software environments. Engineers and developers use various methods to accommodate different operating systems or environments for one application or product.

Cross-Platform Development

The idea of cross-platform development is that a software application or product should work well in more than one specific digital habitat. This capability is typically pursued in order to sell software for more than one proprietary operating system, such as to accommodate use on both Microsoft and Apple platforms. With the development of mobile devices and other kinds of platforms, as well as the proliferation of open-source technologies like Linux, more kinds of cross-platform development have emerged.

Some of the fundamental strategies for cross-platform development include compiling different versions of the same program for different operating systems, or in other cases, the use of sub-tree files to apply or fit the product to different operating systems. Another major approach is to make the program abstract at certain levels in order to accommodate different software environments. Software like this can be said to be "platform agnostic" in that it doesn't value or support one platform over another. Developers can also use application programming interfaces (APIs) to adjust a piece of software to a specific platform.

In general, cross-platform development can make a program less efficient. For example, it can require redundant processes or file storage folders for the various systems that it's supposed to support. It may also require that a program be "dumbed down" to accommodate less sophisticated software environments. However, in many cases, the makers of software figured out that the limitations of cross-platform development are worth dealing with in order to offer an application or product to a wider set of users.

CrossPlatform

Software that can run on multiple types of computer systems. For example, the graphics program Adobe Photoshop and the word processor Microsoft Word are both available for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Therefore, Photoshop and Word are considered to be crossplatform applications.

While "crossplatorm" is typically used to describe computer software, it can refer to hardware as well. For example, peripherals such as keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, and digital cameras that work on both Mac and PC are crossplatorm. Software and hardware that work on more than one platform are also called multiplatform.

In computing, cross-platform, multi-platform, or platform independent, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms. Cross-platform software may be divided into two types; one requires individual building or compilation for each platform that it supports, and the other one can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, e.g., software written in an interpreted language or pre-compiled portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all platforms.

Platforms

The term platform can refer to the type of processor and/or other hardware on which a given operating system or application runs, the type of operating system on a computer or the combination of the type of hardware and the type of operating system running on it.An example of a common platform is Microsoft Windows running on the x86 architecture. Other well-known desktop computer platforms include Linux/Unix and Mac OS X - both of which are themselves cross-platform.There are, however, many devices such as smartphones that are also effectively computer platforms but less commonly thought about in that way. Application software can be written to depend on the features of a particular platform—either the hardware, operating system, or virtual machine it runs on. The Java platform is a virtual machine platform which runs on many operating systems and hardware types, and is a common platform for software to be written for.

Cross-platform software

For a piece of software to be considered cross-platform, it must be able to function on more than one computer architecture or operating system. Developing such a program can be a time-consuming task because different operating systems have different application programming interfaces (API). For example, Linux uses a different API for application software than Windows does.

Just because a particular operating system may run on different computer architectures, that does not mean that the software written for that operating system will automatically work on all architectures that the operating system supports. One example as of August 2006 was OpenOffice.org, which did not natively run on the AMD64 or Intel 64 lines of processors implementing the x86-64 standards for computers; this has since been changed, and the OpenOffice.org suite of software is “mostly” ported to these 64-bit systems.This also means that just because a program is written in a popular programming language such as C or C++, it does not mean it will run on all operating systems that support that programming language—or even on the same operating system on a different architecture.

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