Appcelerator Titanium vsPhoneGap: Cross Platform

Mobile Development

Introduction

“Code once, run everywhere,” that’s what most developers want. From a business’s perspective, if you are looking for development of any software/application for your business, you also prefer to get cross-platform code which can run everywhere, and can help you save on development costs, while giving your business more presence. When it comes to development of mobile apps, there are two famous solutions for cross-platform development about which you will read everywhere; they are PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium.

So what a mobile developer should choose if he is looking for cross platformmobile apps development? Which is better, easier to use, supports more feature, etc? Let us try to find out by analyzing both of them.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is HTML/CSS/JS. Anything you can do with them on a normal web page, you can do in a mobile browser’s web view. PhoneGap works as wrapper of sorts, by leveraging web views native to the mobile devices. PhoneGap allows you to build an app, as complex and modern as you want, while providing the ability to have it gracefully degrade for lower end devices, all in the same code base. PhoneGap allows you to use some of the phones features throught APIs to enhance your application

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium, on the other hand takes your Javascript code, analyzes and preprocesses it and then pre-compiles it into a set of symbols that are resolved based on your applications uses of Titanium APIs. Titanium actually compiles your application and uses the iPhone SDK to build a native application. For example, if you create an animation in Titanium, that’s not a CSS3 animation, it’s a Core Animation that runs on the GPU and the code generated/compiled is part of Core Animation APIs. Similar is for Android. For android, it generates JVM bytecode from your JS and produce native Java Code.

Differences

The fundamental difference between PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium is that, while PhoneGap is a web based solution, Appcelerator Titanium is a pure Javascript API that creates native code.

Summary

So, as it turns out, both are very much different from each other. Both of these frameworks are important and have their place in the mobile landscape. A developer should choose one based upon the requirements and the type of solution required. Neither is the wrong choice, but depending on a scenario, one might be better suited than the other.

Credits: SavageLook.Com | Quora

4/30/2012

At TechAhead, we have experience of creating native, as well as cross platform mobile apps for our clients. If you have any requirement for cross platform mobile application development, contact us on info@techaheadcorp.com for FREE 30 minutes no obligation consultation with our mobile apps experts($200 Value).