From past one year, I have been working on cross-platform mobile frameworks. Thought I would share my point of views in it. Today Mobiles are part of daily life. It is big chanllenge to develop high performance mobile applications that satisfy customers expectations. The developement of new applications in short peroid for each mobile operating sysytem is a big expectation and challenge.
There are 23 cross-platform mobile application development tools as follows,
Framework | URL | Open Source License | Framework Target |
RhoMobile | MIT | Embedded applications | |
Phonegap | Apache Public License v2 | Embedded applications | |
Appspresso | closed source freeware | Embedded applications | |
Appcelerator | Apache Public License v2, Proprietary | Embedded applications | |
AppFurnace | NO | Embedded applications | |
Application Craft | NO | Web, Native and Enterprise Applications | |
iUI | MIT | Web Applications | |
Sencha Touch | GPL v2 (+ commercial edition) | Web Applications | |
MoSync | GPL v2 (+ commercial edition) | Hybrid, Native and Enterprise Applications | |
NS Basic/App Studio | NO | Web Applications | |
WorkLight | NO | Embedded and Enterprise Applications | |
Big5Apps (discontinued) | GPL v2 | Web Applications | |
MobileReflex | NO | Enterprise Applications | |
iPFaces | closed source freeware | Enterprise Applications | |
Canappi | Generated Native Code | Enterprise Applications | |
Jmango | ? | ||
Eclipse Pulsar | ? | ||
mobl | MIT | ? | |
NEXT | Apache Public License v2 | Web Applications | |
QuickConnectFamily | MIT | Embedded and Enterprise Applications | |
Jembe | NO | Embedded and Enterprise Applications | |
codenameone | NO | ? | |
Kivy | LGPL 3 | Embedded and Enterprise Applications |
Now lets see their device-specific capabilities and support platforms.
Rhodes:
Rhomobile suite includes classic products like rhodes, rhoelements, rhohub, rhoconnect, rhogallery and rhostudio. It is a Ruby-based framework that allows you to build your application a very similiar way like Rails. We can build native as well as web based mobile application using Rhodes.
Supported Platform: Android (2.1 and greater than), BlackBerry (4.6, 4.7, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0), Windows mobile, iPhone (3.0 and greater than),Windows Phone 7
Sencha Touch:
Sencha Touch is a full featured widget library based on the Ext JS javascript library and high performance HTML5 mobile application framwork. Its specially target the WebKit Browser.
Supported Platform: Android, iPhone, BlackBerry.
PhoneGap:
PhoneGap is a useful solution for building cross-platform mobile applications , its uses modern Web Technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript. Phone gap is mostly used to build hybrid application because it is not purely native and purely web. It provides Javascript API to develope advance device functionality.
Supported Platform: Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, palm WebOS, Bada.
Appcelerator Titanium:
Titanium from Appceletor.Inc provides rich set tools that are Titanium SDK to develope native mobile application and using to build hybrid and web based mobile application. Titanium Studio is an extensiable for developing titanium application and web application.
Supported Platform: Android, iPhone, BlackBerry (Beta version).
Let’s see some device capabilities of the afore mentioned framworks:
Capability | Rhomobile | SenchaTouch | PhoneGap | Titanium |
Geolocation | | | | |
File uploading | | | ? | |
Camera | | | | |
Maps | | | | |
Accelerometer | | | | |
Contacts | | | ? | |
SMS | | | | |
Barcode | | | ||
Native date/time picker | | ? | |
Hope you may find this blog useful as well.
