Following a recent blog post where Scott Singer describes his use of Corona for business apps and talked briefly about why, in his opinion and according to his needs, Corona suited him better than Titanium and Phonegap...

...in the comments section an interesting conversation started between developers and I thought that it would be great to store those insights in the forum.

So developers, please share your opinion and tell us why Corona is well suited for business apps - or which alternatives are better and why.

Thank you!

If someone wants to focus on business apps and they haven't settled on a framework/language yet, I wouldn't tell them Corona SDK is the best tool for the job. I'd suggest they do some research.

But for those of us who already know Corona? I don't see a compelling reason to go elsewhere. Go to the iTunes store and look for NapKeeper. While it's a "novelty app" it's really a business app in look and feel.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/napkeeper/id460693675?mt=8

And it was done in about 10 hours from start to finish during the last Hackathon. (There's a secret weapon I used to create it and I'll write up a blurb about that and post a link in a bit.)

If that can be done in a day, what could you do in a week or two?

Seriously, people who say Corona SDK isn't a good tool for business apps either need some kind of specialized widget or they just don't like the idea of programmatically laying out the widgets rather than drag and drop (it's a pain, I'll admit).

Is Corona the "best thing" for biz apps? Maybe not the best, but in many cases something you already know beats something you need to learn.

Jay

PS - I think the reason more business app aren't written in Corona is simply that games are more fun to write. :)

[Edit: Here's the article I wrote: Corona SDK for Business Apps – A Secret Weapon: http://wp.me/p1U1o1-7k ]

An area of Corona Development I have not seen any of is in forms collection.

I am sure there is a huge business market for this type of app. These sort of apps would be used by data collectors surveying people. The data collected could be sent back to a central database (in real time via the cloud or uploaded later).

Is this the sort of business app that Corona can create?

What other types of business apps would Corona struggle with?

>>An area of Corona Development I have not seen any of is in forms collection.
.. These sort of apps would be used by data collectors surveying people. ..
Is this the sort of business app that Corona can create?
<<
From what I've seen so far, its a walk in the park.
Ideally, you'ld want native text boxes, but even without them, all you need is a table for the data, the ability to chuck up the native keyboard, and a way to post data back.

Native text fields has gotten better now that we can see them in the simulator, but its far from being able to easily manage multiple fields. There is multiple field support, but you have to scroll fields into position and not being able to see the keyboard in the simulator makes that harder to work.

Most business apps "can" be done, but you may find its a bit of work to do with Corona SDK.

Not having the keyboard in the simulator is pain, but the Xcode Simulator does it have.
I just sent a business app for approval last night. It's an update of one I made in Gamesalad a few months ago. I was able to use the native keyboard and text fields in the Corona version to make it a lot slicker. Not to mention adding Ads and Analytics.

As for Multi text field management, I have lots of them and I used a simple system off offset and scale. It lets me move the fields around quicky and adjust spacing and font size, even by platform if I wish.

The App is an ANC Calculator for Cancer Patients, when the corona version is approved I will post a link.

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local spaceing = 32
local baseheight =60
 
fField = native.newTextField( 10,baseheight+ (spaceing*0), 120, tHeight, polysfieldHandler )
bField = native.newTextField( 10, baseheight+ (spaceing*1) , 120, tHeight, bandsfieldHandler )
wbcField = native.newTextField( 10, baseheight+ (spaceing*2), 120, tHeight, wbcfieldHandler )
ancText = native.newTextBox( 10, baseheight+ (spaceing*3), 120, tHeight )