Windows Phone Thoughts: Go Cross Platform With GoDB

I was recently made aware of a cross platform development platform, GoDB, that has come in under my radar screen. For many years I looked at any and all cross platform development tools and environments with great suspicion and doubt. Then AppForge released Crossfire, a Visual Studio .NET add-in that enables VB.NET programmers to target Pocket PC, Palm, Nokia Series 60, or Sony Ericsson P800/P900 with, more or less, one code base. I wrote a brief review called "Four Lines of Code goes Four Platforms".

From what I can see on Consign Technology's site regarding their product GoDB they claim they enable cross platform development across Pocket PC, Palm, Nokia Communicator, Linux and Windows desktop platforms. What stands out, in my opinion, is the focus on database management and features. Consign Technology writes: "GoDB applications can be designed to be Offline, Online or Hybrid. Offline applications are those that do not require network connectivity to work. GoDB intelligently caches the required data on the client so the application can continue to run even when connectivity is not available. When the connection is restored the data is synchronized with the server securely. Online applications can be built that utilize "always-on" connectivity for real-time information exchange. GoDB allows you to design Special Hybrid applications that store large master tables on the device which are synchronized periodically while allowing the user to execute realtime online transactions using the local tables."

Knowing that integration is the number one challenge in mobile application development project I think it sounds very interesting!