Maneesh Godbole wrote:What is app? Smart phone app?
In that case your choice of language would be defined by the platform. e.g. For Android you would require Java. For iOS you would require Swift/Objective C
Besides these you can also choose cross platform options like Appcelerator
Richard Mann wrote:I would like to develop an app where I can enter a word/phrase, specify using tick boxes which online dictionaries/glossaries I want to search, hit Enter, then receive back a list of all the entries from the online dictionaries, ...
And speed is vital - I want the dictionary results/hits to be returned as fast as possible
Part of the latency (besides time taken by your app to process + network) is the time time taken by the online dictionaries to generate a result. If these are third party, there is nothing you can do to speed them up.
Thanks for your reply.
Oops, should have specified the platform/OS: Since I do my translation work on my laptop, then that's what I want to focus on initially because looking up multiple dictionaries would be very inconvenient on a smartphone. Even the largest smartphone screens would make such a task very awkward (since you'd be talking about dozens and dozens of hits). I suppose it would just about work on a tablet as far as screen size is concerned, but then again I need a proper keyboard since I can type far faster with a proper keyboard than I can with an on-screen one. At present I want to implement this project just as an aid to make my job easier, but even if I provided it online for download, the main people who'd be interested in it would be language students and translators, and again I can't imagine them trying to use such an app on anything other than a laptop, PC or Mac, purely due to screen size.
So for now I'm talking about laptops/PCs (running Windows, GNU/Linux or other OS) and Macs.
I'd like the app to work on as many operating systems (and versions of those OSes) as possible, so is there an app similar to Appcelerator that will do the same thing for non-mobile apps? (i.e. create once, then run on any hardware/OS?)
It's just occurred to me: Would it be possible to implement this dictionary project as a browser add-on? That would make sense since I want the dictionary hits to be displayed in a browser window and/or in separate tabs (one tab for each dictionary looked up). And if so, which programming language would be best suited to creating a browser add-on? Or could this be done with a scripting language?
As for latency (so that's the term! thanks for that), it doesn't appear I have much control over that since it boils down to the online dictionaries themselves. Obvious really when you think about it.