Intel gave developers an early Christmas present with the release of update to the XDK, its HTML5 app development environment for creating cross-platform apps for app stores and devices.
The December update brought several new features (particularly for Android developers), supported only on mobile devices running Android version 4 or higher.
• Remote debugging: A new “Debug” tab for testing and debugging Web and hybrid apps, enabled via a new on-device “App Analyzer” app downloaded from the Intel XDK. The remote debugger sets code breakpoints, inspects variables, and single-steps through source code.
• JavaScript Profiling: Downloads and runs applications on an Android-based mobile device, and collects statistics to let developers see exactly which portions of the source code are using the most CPU.
• Crosswalk-based Web runtime: The newly integrated open-source Crosswalk project for Android uses a HTML5 rendering and layout engine to improve JavaScript, WebGL and Web Audio performance. The Crosswalk engine can also augment the JavaScript engine with hooks for greater fidelity in remote debugging and performance analysis.
The XDK already comes with a cross-platform editor, device emulator and debugger. Other features include an app for on-device testing, a mobile-optimized JavaScript UI library, and a prototype GUI quick-start wizard. The IDE also supports the App Framework UI jQuery plug-in and Apache Cordova API.
The XDK runs on Android, Chrome, iOS, OS X, and Windows 7 and 8.
