Write your complicated, shared code once

write once, sorta runs everywhere

One of the deadly sins of software development is duplicating logic. I won't attempt a software engineering 101 class in a blog post: but you are more or less guaranteed to create bugs when you have logic doing the same thing implemented in two different places.


There was a time when this was easy: just don't cut and paste your code. Put everything in a library, then just use your library across projects. This time pretty much ended when we started using javascript to do Interesting Things on the web. When we started also doing interesting things on phones, it was long past.

Now we end up writing lots of code twice or more, because your server is probably written in java or .net, or php, or ruby and your phone is written in objective-c, or java, or something else.

Take a look at the fairly amazing diff-match-patch library used for keeping text documents in sync:

http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk

Neil Fraser has written that library in python (both 2 and 3), java, javascript, c++, c#, lua, dart, and objective-c. While I have to admit a certain amount of awe for that guy's multilingual skills and the attention to detail necessary to get that stuff written in a way that all those implementations talk to each other correctly, I am not sure I want to spend that kind of time.

I also don't want to try to shoe-horn a project into a single common language. We tried that with Java once upon a time, we are currently trying it with javascript (in the form of node.js, and phonegap). These solutions always force you to accept some unacceptable compromise. Maybe phonegap and node.js works for your product. But chances are, someone else has something that is much better written in python and objective-c.

Write-once, run everywhere remains a non-starter in the general case.

What makes a whole lot more sense to me is to write only the code that must be shared once.

Figure out what your complicated, shared code is. If you are writing a shared text editor using diff-match-patch, it is that algorithm that is complicated, and must be shared across platforms.

Write _that_ in javascript.

Embed it in your code using a hidden WebView in IOS, Rhino in java, or maybe Ringo in Python.

There are a million embedded javascript solutions out there.

Then you are free to write the rest of your client and server independently of one another.