Can anyone explain me the USP of corona and where it helps us in terms of mobile application development?
I am trying to understand all about corona but quite unsure about its power, so any help from your side would be appreciated.
Thanks all.
Hello @hnrindani and welcome to the Corona Labs community forums.
Corona Labs makes a suite of products from Corona SDK to Corona Enterprise and CoronaCards.
Corona SDK is a free to use product. Corona Enterprise and CoronaCards are a paid license product. Let’s talk first about Corona’s products in general.
Corona uses a language called Lua, an easy to use language that’s available on multiple platforms. Your code you write in Lua and build with Corona Labs products can be used to produce apps for iOS, Android, tvOS, Android TV, Windows x86 Desktop, macOS Desktop and a host of other smaller platforms from a single code base. While OS specific features will have to be addressed, for the most part 95%+ of a projects will be cross-platform. An example of where it’s not cross-platform would be if you wanted to use GameCenter for Apple and Google Play Games Service for Android.
Corona apps are built upon OpenGL for graphics speed of moving graphics around the screen making it a very powerful 2D game platform. But it’s not just for games, quite a few business style and utility style apps can be built with Corona.
The Corona Labs products have access to over 1000 different, but simple to use API calls. For instance if you have an image named “ball.png” and you want to draw it on the screen at position 100, 100 you do:
local ball = display.newImage( “ball.png”, 100, 100 )
Other languages might take 10 lines of code to do that one function. We tout that building apps with Corona is 10x faster than other languages.
Now for the products themselves.
Corona SDK. You download this, use a text editor of your choice to write your code and use the Corona simulator to see your code changes in real time (you save your edits, the simulator updates with the changes). Once your app has progressed far enough, you can have Corona build a device build of your app and get it installed on the device for further testing. When ready you do a deployment build to send to the appropriate store for sales. Corona SDK is free to use. You can use both macOS and Windows as development platforms with restrictions that building for Apple products has to be done on a Mac. Building for Windows Desktop has to be done on a Windows Machine. Android can be done in either.
Corona Enterprise. This tool allows you to use Xcode to do off-line builds (We are working on a Windows version) that let you access and include native functionality that Corona SDK does not support. For instance, if you wanted to access iBeacons for iOS, something currently not part of Corona SDK, you could include the appropriate framework in Xcode and then bridge the Objective C/Swift native code with your Lua code so you can access it from your Corona Code.
CoronaCards is similar to Enterprise, but it’s designed for the native developer who wants to include a CoronaView in their existing native app. While you can bridge native and Corona functionality together, with Enterprise the Corona app is the main display and you use native things to enhance the Corona App. With CoronaCards, the native apps the main display and you can bring up a CoronaCards window when you need it.
Corona Labs has a very vibrant, professional and educated community of developers here in the forums who help out asking questions, something we are quite blessed to have.
Rob
Hello @hnrindani and welcome to the Corona Labs community forums.
Corona Labs makes a suite of products from Corona SDK to Corona Enterprise and CoronaCards.
Corona SDK is a free to use product. Corona Enterprise and CoronaCards are a paid license product. Let’s talk first about Corona’s products in general.
Corona uses a language called Lua, an easy to use language that’s available on multiple platforms. Your code you write in Lua and build with Corona Labs products can be used to produce apps for iOS, Android, tvOS, Android TV, Windows x86 Desktop, macOS Desktop and a host of other smaller platforms from a single code base. While OS specific features will have to be addressed, for the most part 95%+ of a projects will be cross-platform. An example of where it’s not cross-platform would be if you wanted to use GameCenter for Apple and Google Play Games Service for Android.
Corona apps are built upon OpenGL for graphics speed of moving graphics around the screen making it a very powerful 2D game platform. But it’s not just for games, quite a few business style and utility style apps can be built with Corona.
The Corona Labs products have access to over 1000 different, but simple to use API calls. For instance if you have an image named “ball.png” and you want to draw it on the screen at position 100, 100 you do:
local ball = display.newImage( “ball.png”, 100, 100 )
Other languages might take 10 lines of code to do that one function. We tout that building apps with Corona is 10x faster than other languages.
Now for the products themselves.
Corona SDK. You download this, use a text editor of your choice to write your code and use the Corona simulator to see your code changes in real time (you save your edits, the simulator updates with the changes). Once your app has progressed far enough, you can have Corona build a device build of your app and get it installed on the device for further testing. When ready you do a deployment build to send to the appropriate store for sales. Corona SDK is free to use. You can use both macOS and Windows as development platforms with restrictions that building for Apple products has to be done on a Mac. Building for Windows Desktop has to be done on a Windows Machine. Android can be done in either.
Corona Enterprise. This tool allows you to use Xcode to do off-line builds (We are working on a Windows version) that let you access and include native functionality that Corona SDK does not support. For instance, if you wanted to access iBeacons for iOS, something currently not part of Corona SDK, you could include the appropriate framework in Xcode and then bridge the Objective C/Swift native code with your Lua code so you can access it from your Corona Code.
CoronaCards is similar to Enterprise, but it’s designed for the native developer who wants to include a CoronaView in their existing native app. While you can bridge native and Corona functionality together, with Enterprise the Corona app is the main display and you use native things to enhance the Corona App. With CoronaCards, the native apps the main display and you can bring up a CoronaCards window when you need it.
Corona Labs has a very vibrant, professional and educated community of developers here in the forums who help out asking questions, something we are quite blessed to have.
Rob