Just a few days ago we had a chance to look at Appcelerator platform and its  Titanium family of products.
We looked primarily at Titanium Mobile, as both Android and iPhone  are of a significant interest for us – we do lots of development for these platforms.

So we’ve played quite a bit with Titanium Mobile and here’s quick summary of our opinions:

Pros:
• Same code that works on iPhone and Android platforms. As Android market gets traction, the option to “kill two birds” with one code-base looks like really cool.
• Enough to know html/CSS/js to develop. This is important. Especially for iPhone. While we regard Android Java SDK as a very good development platform and our J2EE engineers just love coding for Android (although they quite shun from J2ME)  iPhone Objective C is pretty different story. It is difficult to learn, it is bug-prone. It has quite weird callback logic. In fact, it is literally impossible to train Java or Ruby or Python engineer into iPhone engineer. Titanium Mobile opens iPhone apps world to even more light-weight technologies, and this is just great.
• Easy to install and to use.
• Free and open source.

Cons:
• Optimality of generated native code and native SDK coverage is questionable. Our experience shows that all such translator solutions (and another example is Adobe’s Action Script – 2 Objective C builder) do not cover complete set of native SDK functions. Honestly speaking we did not run into such situation with Titanium Mobile, but our gut feel is that there should be some limitations.
• Ability to quikly support new SDK releases. Apple’n'Google naturally are enhancing their SDKs all the time. Ability of appcelerator to quickly follow these changes is questionable.

That said, here’s our current view on how Cogniance may use Titanium Mobile: it is definitely useful when quick’n'dirty prototyping should be done or when app functionality is pretty straightforward and simple. But, if the task is to create state-of-the-art app which utilizes many advanced SDK features we will probably not risk to go with Titanium Mobile and go straight to native layer.  Yet, we appreciate that Cogniance is not exactly target consumer for Titanium Mobile, as we’ve already got both iPhone and Android engineers and Mobile targets web developers w/o native layers knowledge.

Written by:  Sergii Gorpynich

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Mobile technologies, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 technologies.
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2 Responses to “Building iPhone and Android apps with HTML/CSS/JS”

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