Cross-platform phone frameworks

From: Peter (BOUGHTONP) 1 Sep 2009 23:26
To: ALL1 of 6
Anyone tried any of them yet?

All the main players seem to support Android and iPhone, with some also supporting Blackberry, Symbian and Win Mobile.

Rhomobile Rhodes
Nitobi PhoneGap
Appcelerator Titanium

Aside from being able to write one app and have it work with both the big platforms, if I can use HTML, JavaScript and jQuery (instead of that horrid XML stuff I've tried to purge from my mind), and yet still be able to access the harness the device's sensors and have the app styled appropriately, that alone is an attraction.

So, has anyone here had a go with them, and formed any opinions?
From: THERE IS NO GOD BUT (RENDLE) 2 Sep 2009 06:59
To: Peter (BOUGHTONP) 2 of 6

Rhodes is OK, but the documentation isn't great, and you end up with something that doesn't particularly fit the platform, and a limited UI compared to what you can achieve with the proper API. Ruby, though!

 

It's an area that's going to mature a lot over the next couple of years, I think. MonoTouch, which is a Mono .NET framework and toolkit that compiles to native iPhone, seems to be the best effort so far. They're planning on targeting other systems with it, although it's covered in Cocoa-style NS* naming so they might be planning to create separate class libraries for Android etc.

 

Part of the issue is that the underlying concepts of the different OSes are very different: Android's got its own JVM and the whole Activities and Intents paradigm; webOS is basically WebKit; iPhone is a Cocoa deriviative and the backgrounding has been bolted on. Symbian and RIM are the most traditional, since they're basically just Java ME. And Windows Mobile can fuck off until they release 7.

 

BTW, it's possible to write Android apps without using "that horrid XML stuff", although it's not recommended. Unfortunately it's not possible without using that horrid Java stuff; is it just me, or have Sun given up?

From: THERE IS NO GOD BUT (RENDLE) 2 Sep 2009 07:13
To: Peter (BOUGHTONP) 3 of 6
Oh, and how is writing code in Javascript possibly better than, say, typing fully-namespaced XML markup with your eyeballs on a keyboard made of broken glass?
From: Peter (BOUGHTONP) 2 Sep 2009 19:30
To: THERE IS NO GOD BUT (RENDLE) 4 of 6
As a language (i.e. excluding shitty browser stuff), JavaScript has got quite a few cool features.

It's certainly not the best language in the world, but it's a lot better than it's given credit for.
From: THERE IS NO GOD BUT (RENDLE) 2 Sep 2009 19:49
To: Peter (BOUGHTONP) 5 of 6

I will allow that there are some nice features, like first-class functions. And it facilitates jQuery, which is very nice. But for proper object-oriented programming it's pretty much fucked. And its array handling is a hideous nightmare. And jQuery lacks the array handling niceties of Prototype.js, and Scriptaculous lacks 99% of what's in jQuery UI and associated plug-ins.

 

If the W3C and the browser people could get their acts together and unleash Javascript 2.0 on the world, we might be getting somewhere. But I have no faith that this will ever come to pass.

From: Ally 5 Sep 2009 00:48
To: THERE IS NO GOD BUT (RENDLE) 6 of 6
I could never, ever, get on with jQuery. Mootools is fantastic, and has a UI library called Mocha that... I've never used. Hm.