Since a half year I use my iPad every day - for reading emails, reading the Web, reading my Perry Rhodan issues and other magazines and books. A few weeks ago, I started using iPad to write protocols and use the Numbers App from Apple more and more.
What I am missing is to write programs. I'm not talking about big software but really useful small programs. How could that be?
The iPad is the accessor to the Web. In consequence, programming on the iPad doesn't mean to program the iPad itself, but to program in the Web. Thanks to Google and others, office documents can be produced and changed in the Web. So why not programs ?
But what would a Web - or better said - Cloud hosted program look like ? In the age before the cloud, creating software was done by accessing the capabilities of the operating system - the APIs - to fetch data, build graphics, to persist data and create a data and control flow with a programming language. Well, the Cloud has no operating system, but it has also capabilities to fetch or send data, to create graphics via SVG or WebGL and to store data. Even such kind of API are available, which in fact are the REST, SOAP or other interfaces. Twitter, Facebook and other portals use such techniques. The problem is the language. If there would be such kind of editor in the web, and a programming language - or let's better say if there would be a Cloud hosted development environment, which would allow to use and bind this "Web API" with data and control flow, yes, then I could program with the iPad. I could program algorithms, create visualizations and would not have to think much to store data, or to access data. Where my programs are stored would not be relevant at all. Just make data processing in it's strikt and pure sense.
Unfortunately, I don't know such a Web Development Environment. Is there any ?
