In advance of the second annual Tizen Developer Conference, which will be held in San Francisco on 22 – 24 May, Jean Francois Moy takes five minutes to catch up with the Orange Partner team about his work with Tizen.
As Senior Software Engineer at Orange Labs UK, Jean Francois’ expertise has always been in mobile technologies, working with native platforms such as iOS and Android. Just over a year ago, his team switched their focus to mobile web development with HTML5.
What skills does one need to develop for Tizen?
You would need front-end web development skills, and you would need to be really good in JavaScript.
What framework do you use for development on Tizen?
It is important to have a good structure for your mobile web applications and it’s important to use a MVC (Model View Controller) framework. Our team loves flexibility so we use Backbone.JS which gives a good structure to rely on, with a flexibility to develop our projects. Other MVC frameworks are available such as Angular, or Ember if you prefer a more static structure.
Regarding the UI, Tizen encourages the usage of jQuery UI. However, our application often embed innovative design and user experience so we usually don’t embed it and develop all components on our own.
What interesting things is Orange developing on Tizen?
We are working with a lot of upcoming apps on Tizen, which will be available at the launch. We have also been providing a lot of feedback to the Tizen team about what APIs to add and how to improve the existing ones. They’ve really taken this on board and we’re getting great results in advance of the first devices launching this year.
What are the good points of developing for Tizen compared to other platforms?
Using this web development you can target all browsers and reuse the same code across different platforms.
What about the fragmentation issue?
The web will always be fragmented, but because most mobile browsers are based on webkit, it is limited and manageable. What’s more, Tizen has one of the highest HTML5 compliance scores on a mobile.
Are there any bad points you’ve encountered so far for Tizen development?
It’s hard to judge, as the platform has not been launched yet. As you’d expect there are a few bugs, but we haven’t come across any major issues. Tizen have been really open to our feedback as part of their continuous improvement.
Find out more about why Orange has engaged with Tizen.
Source Orange Partner
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