How can you make your application portable across different platforms?

In my experience as web developer my natural choice is JavaScript it is the language cross-platform by the facto, as it is intended to run by browsers which ones shares a common rules to interpret the code. Nowadays JavaScript could be use in servers, mobile devices, and, regular devices as any laptops/desktop, no matters the OS used. as any other cross-platform language, limitations appears when accessing to specific OS features are a requirement, on the other hand, there is an inherits benefits as reach a wider audience with no major efforts. So consider these points before choose your language: - Should it access any specific OS feature? - Community support/usage - Which frameworks have the language that solves common requirements.

JavaScript is an excellent option for cross-platform implementations. However, there is no doubt that it has received a fair share of criticism. It is a language forced to mature in order to handle purposes for which it was not originally intended. Also, with the aid of popular JS frameworks, JavaScript has been supercharged to hopefully handle the fiercest of expectations. By exaggeration, this can be compared to fitting rocket engines on a horse carriage. Developers still run into fundamental issues and limitations with the language. Hence, in order to realize the full potential of JS when dealing with medium to large and complex situations, Typescript is to the rescue. Typescript is a beloved language which is a "superset" of JavaScript.

The discussion about cross-platform frameworks often occurs in the context of client application development (or front-end). A simple approach can be implemented using the following workflow/toolset (for example): Design your interface with HTML, CSS (or SCSS for theming). - Web: Build your interface with Angular framework (Typescript) for web. - Mobile: Bootstrap your app with Ionic/capacitor for mobile (android/ios) - Desktop: Bootstrap your app with Electron.js for desktop implementation. With this you would have a consistent and unified implementation of your application across platforms. The advantage of this unified nature is also realized when maintaining pipelines in integration with DevOps.

In my experience cross-platform frameworks are a good solution for simple requirements, they provide you a out of box solution for most common problems, but they could become complex easily as your application and requirements grows, so the key of success is keep things as much simple as you can, and do not over-engineering your solutions, so create pragmatic solutions just to the present problems. Other important principle to apply when you chose a cross-platform framework is "know your tools" so start by learn the key features as the pitfall ones in your framework chosen.

coding standards is a common pitfall easy to avoid if you set correctly up "linters" and "prettiers" tools, so you don't need to learn each code standard in each language, by the contrary you should learn how to set up the tools that guide you to the best standards and practices. As soon you rely in automated code guardians you will delivering fast value instead of worrying in the shape of the code.

Choose a coding convention that allows you to properly indicate code that requires special attention on each platform. A convention should be planned and applied religiously in order to clearly indicate blocks of code where each platform has to be targeted separately. This could be in terms of styling, custom logic, native functions invocations, etc. In addition to adding comments, a consistent step-by-step coding approach should be applied as a pattern when implementing similar functionalities across the application. This would make it easy to isolate important variations during fixes, upgrades, and refactoring. Also, a language or framework that enforces coding patterns and conventions would provide a great baseline for best practices.

Being a cross-platform application does not imply that the same configuration requirements would be identically implemented on different platforms. At the inception or during major dependency upgrades, configuring your application and testing on different platforms are usually inseparable until a viable configuration is determined for each platform. This is to be properly documented and automated as far as your CI/CD solution safely allows. Once this is setup, an update plan or workflow is to be established and evaluated. Subsequently, testing on various platforms can be conducted without the hassle of reconfiguration. Only focused changes to the experience would be mostly required if necessitated by the results at the testing phase.

The question is too generic. With software development, you have to be specific as to what the goals are. The question would have to consider too many assumptions to be answered.