Continuing its push to help developers create new connected apps for the Internet of Things, Embarcadero has made the latest release of Appmethod available to active subscribers and new Appmethod developers. The release is aimed at helping developers streamline the creation of apps for IoT using a single app development platform and shared C++ codebase. According to Embarcadero, Appmethod September 2014 Release provides a complete software development solution for building natively compiled C++ apps that connect mobile and desktop devices, sensors, gadgets, wearables, cloud services, and data.
This release is in line with Embarcadero’s stated strategy for IoT which includes a focus on four key areas of interconnection: mobile/desktop devices; gadgets; cloud services; and, data. The company is offering new technologies to address these areas of concentration. This new Appmethod release closely follows the recent introduction of RAD Studio XE7, which is designed to help developers extend existing Windows apps to mobile devices, gadgets, and sensors.
Citing industry estimates that the IoT will grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020 (in addition to 7.3 billion PCs, tablets and smartphones), Embarcadero notes that this profusion of IoT devices will represent a nearly 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion in 2009. "The device landscape has exploded beyond PCs, tablets and smartphones. Now, wearables, sensors, home automation, and connected cars present a completely new app ecosystem. Apps no longer live on a single device and instead are interconnected across a broad range of ‘things’ to deliver an integrated yet distributed solution,” said Michael Swindell, senior vice president of products at Embarcadero.
With the new release of Appmethod, Embarcadero says app developers can now create designs across any device or form factor using the new FireUI Multi-Device Designer and user interface (UI) components. And, using the latest release of Appmethod, developers can build apps for Android, iOS, Windows and OS X that interconnect with IoT via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi app tethering. New enterprise mobility services from Appmethod provide an out-of-the-box app mobility middleware server for connecting to private cloud data and custom APIs.
"We designed Appmethod to make it incredibly simple to build powerful cross-platform apps with C++ that easily connect with and include a wide variety of consumer and industrial devices, sensors, enterprise data, and cloud service,” said Swindell. “Appmethod is designed as a complete end-to-end platform that can rapidly open the IoT door for developers building the next generation of device-extended applications.”
Appmethod is available from appmethod.com, and the free version can be downloaded from appmethod.com/sign-up.