This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5 years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app development and not desktop application development.
Yep, it may not be in 5 years but it's only a matter of time, no matter what native app developers would like you to believe. If we learned one thing from desktops, it was don't underestimate the web. Good to see things start coming back full circle with the mobile web.
I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.
I've been rewriting my latest released Android game in Html5 and Coffeescript for PhoneGap, which lets me deploy on iOS and Android, plus Blackberry and other platforms, but I'm focusing on iOS and Android for now. I'm doing that because I need to make an iOS version, and would rather spend my dev time adding more features or developing more products rather than redeveloping the same product on multiple platforms. This approach also opens me up to the possibility of having a web version, perhaps a Facebook and/or Google+ module. I'm astounded on how much smaller my code is in Coffeescript than Java. It's about 1/2 the size of its Java counterpart.
Many people will of course not move on to HTML5 app development. Every time technology changes, lots of people don't migrate. But it really is an amazing way to go. Coffeescript solves a lot of problems and makes the code very small. Jasmine unit testing helps with the scary feeling of not having type safety. PhoneGap lets you deploy it as a native app. Chrome has a surprisingly awesome stepping debugger built right in. Vim + the cofeescript plugin automatically compile the Coffeescript every time you save. The difficulties of debugging in Coffeescript are mostly overstated in my experience, and countered by the feeling that I'm developing code faster than I ever have before in any other language.
It's not all cake and ponies, and I've had to figure out a number of things. But it's a really fantastic way to develop apps. Try it.
