The Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) held its monthly Saturday meetup on 1^st August 2015 at Flying Dodo, Bagatelle. The title of the meetup was “cross-platform development”. It was scheduled to start at 11h00. I reached Bagatelle Mall some time around 11h30 and met some friends right in front of Flying Dodo. A casual chit-chat lasted like 30 mins. Oops! I’m late. I met Nayar who had just arrived. We rushed upstairs and I opened the door slightly enough to poke my head inside. I smiled :) Damn! It was house full. I waived at a couple of people and took a chair next to Sun. Humeira, whom I met earlier outside Flying Dodo, was there too. The usual introduction was happening. We, the frequent attendees of MSCC meetups, are used to it now. At my turn, I shot that I do R&D at Stella Telecom and I work with Humeira and Nayar.

At my last count, we were some 27 people in the conference room.

JoKi did a presentation on Apache Cordova, a popular platform that allows developers to build mobile apps using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript, yet having a native look & feel. Cordova was previously known as PhoneGap. In 2011, Adobe acquired the company that built PhoneGap and till date continues development on top of Apache Cordova. Around the same time in 2011, PhoneGap contributed code to the Apache foundation and the project was continued by the community as Apache Cordova.

Nostalgia! During the Orange Code Challenge in 2013, my small team of sysadmins won the 2^nd prize thanks to phoneGap which helped us deploy the same HTML5 code on iOS and Android.

We had a short break, some went on the terrace for fresh air while others stayed inside chatting. Humeira, Sun and I had ordered a pizza and drinks.

The Microsoft Student Partners had their prez after the break. Alex, Prashant and Gulshan put heavy emphasis on code reuse and cross-platform development. Alex made a bold statement with “you are all mobile developers”.

Alexandre Bazille

Alex spoke about Xamarin. He stressed on the cost benefits of writing code once rather than having three teams to code in three different languages targeting native environments of iOS, Windows and Android. Prashant then gave a demo of Xamarin and Visual Studio 2015. Gulshan presented the steps to create an application from scratch. Unfortunately, due to other commitments I had to leave. That was yet another interesting and knowledge-enriching meetup by the MSCC.