Like all development framework providers, Corona Labs' role is to make the life of developers just that little bit easier.

Porting, minimising time-to-market and monetisation are, in particular, billed as Corona's speciality.

Indeed, with the launch of Corona Enterprise – which adds the ability to call any native Objective-C or Java library to its existing SDK – the firm claims, for the first time, developers can now master all three elements with added flexibity.

Such boasts aren't limited to Corona, however. Just how are developers supposed to tell the wheat from the chaff and choose between competing frameworks? What exactly can Corona offer to studios that its rivals can't?

To find out, we spoke to Corona Labs COO David Rangel, who explained more about Corona's tools, made some bold promises and predicted a fragmented future.

Pocket Gamer: What is Corona Enterprise, and how does it differ from the existing Corona SDK development platform?

David Rangel: Corona Enterprise takes the core Corona SDK engine and adds the ability to call any native library, along with other hooks and tools to make it easy to use.

These libraries can be in Objective-C for iOS or Java for Android.

Corona Enterprise customers can still build their core gameplay in Lua and leverage Corona SDK's APIs and development speed, but can now add any additional functionality they may require that isn't yet built into the core platform.

There are a few other tools, primarily around workflow for larger teams, that will be added to Corona Enterprise in the near future.

While many developers, from indies to studios, have built hit apps and games with Corona SDK, some larger studios were unable to use the platforms because they needed to integrate things such as their own analytics library.

With the release of Corona Enterprise, this is now possible.

How does Corona help its developers to publish and monetise their applications?

First, we have partnered with leading monetisation companies to provide our developers with the best built-in options in the market. We also have more partners lined up and that we'll announce soon.

Second, we help our developers as much as possible through tutorials, educational resources and general guidance on how to best publish, market and monetise their apps.

A large portion of our developers are indies and small studios; they really appreciate the guidance as they enter today's competitive app stores.

To be clear, we don't act as publishers. Developers use Corona to build apps, but are then free to publish and market these apps in any way they see fit.

Why should game developers use Corona rather than competing cross-platform development tools from larger companies?

Corona is very well positioned along several vectors. First of all, in terms of functionality and efficiency.

Corona is unsurpassed in development speed and efficiency for 2D apps and games. There are other tools out there, but we guarantee that you will build your 2D apps more quickly with Corona, especially if you are going cross-platform.

The great thing is that you give up very little in terms of power – there are high quality games and apps being built every day on Corona, by indies and sophisticated game studios.

Secondly, Corona's maturity is an advantage – the platform has been on the market for more than 3 years now and has been used by over 150,000 developers worldwide. This means that it has been tested and hardened in the real world by real developers.

This is something that is important to developers as they make a platform decision – they don't want to make a bet on unproven or untested technology.

Lastly, Corona has traction and maturity. As mentioned above, we have a large number of developers building great apps with Corona and contributing back to the community with tools, libraries, advice, etc.

This means that new Corona developers can leverage this community and benefit from a large and growing ecosystem.

The issue of fragmentation, particularly on Android, doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. How much of a challenge is it to deliver content from a single codebase to such a range of devices and OS versions?

This is definitely a huge challenge for anyone building apps today.

However, this is an area where we add a lot of value because it's our job to make sure Corona-based apps work on as many devices as possible. We do this in two main ways.

Firstly, we provide APIs that facilitate development for devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. The developer can rely on Corona to use the right images, the right aspect ratio, etc.

This addresses fragmentation issues within platforms – for example, normal displays versus retina displays, or small devices versus tablets – and across platforms.

Secondly, we test Corona against all types of devices, especially on the Android side. This is a big issue and it is not uncommon to have devices that, because of their graphics chipset or OpenGL implementation, end up breaking apps that work well on a majority of other devices.

We deal with these issues and fix potential problems on a daily basis. Our developers just need to download a new daily build of Corona to build their app and they have automatically fixed the issue.

If they were not on Corona, they would have to track down these issues themselves, figure out how to fix obscure rendering issues, and test across a huge set of devices.

And you are right – the fragmentation issue is not going away. As new platforms and devices emerge, it will only get worse.

Do you see the 'write once and publish everywhere' philosophy as the future of the mobile games industry, or will more tailored content always be required?

There will always be a need to do tailoring for specific platforms, if only because each platform will support a different set of features.

Two simple examples – today the Kindle Fire and Nook do not have integrated GPS, and Game Center is only available on iOS.

If you are building an app with Corona across iOS, Android, Kindle and Nook, you would be able to leverage most of the same code base, but would have to make allowances for those differences. That won't go away anytime soon.

However, we do think there is huge value in writing once for the things that do translate across platforms, using Corona this will usually be for at least 90 percent of the code base.

It makes very little sense for studios, whether big or small, to need two or more separate teams working on the same app, just because they want to maximise coverage.
Thanks to David for his time.You can find out more about Corona Enterprise on the Corona Labs website.