cross platform mobile development with phongap, rhomobile, and titanium
I've been working on a cross platform mobile application for keeping track of how much time I spend doing things. Basically a consultants helper to make sure I'm spending appropriate amounts of time doing the things that move me forward and keep me aware of how much time I'm spending doing things that aren't going in the right direction.
Anyway, having done mobile web development and knowing the pain there, as well as having put together a few android/iOs "hello world" applications, I did NOT want to go down the "build 3 different versions" road. I understand that there are compelling reasons to do this, but there aren't compelling enough to do it (in my situation).
Knowing that there are a number of solutions in this space, I narrowed it down to things that seem to have #1 the most innovation and #2 the highest potential to NOT be a dead end career wise. My list was narrowed down to titanium mobile,rhomobile, and phonegap. First off, titanium certainly has the best press corps in my opinion, the down side is that they appear to be going down the IBM path. That is, they're trying to build an "everything but the kitchen sink" heavyweight solution that is pretty off putting. In addition, the requirement to download proprietary development tools is just not where I want to go at this moment. While their solution looks very complete, I can't help but feeling it will end up being a dead end career wise. What I mean by this is that I think eventuall titanium will end up going the way of coldfusion - it will be widely used and very lucrative, but you'll be branded as a "titanium guy" for the rest of your career. For the reasons I mentioned, I actually downloaded the sdk, but didn't actually do any development using it.
Next is Rhomobile. One thing that excites me about Rhomobile AND phonegap is their distributed build system. This means I can actually build the cross platform components and NOT necessarily have the full SDK installed on my machine. Another upside to Rhomobile is that it uses ruby (a language I happen to like), but that upside quickly turns into a downside. I spent a number of hours trying to figure out how the browser components interacted with the ruby components and ultimately gave up. Rhomobile, I like the idea, but your solution is WAAAY too complicated and confusing. The other downside to Rhomobile is that same sort of "proprietary lock in" that I think will plague titanium. While I like the concept, I cannot get on board with rhomobile at this point.
Last, but certainly not least is phonegap. I actually used this for the first time almost a year ago and at that time I wasn't really impressed. An upcoming project I may take on had mentioned they're going to probably use this so I took another look. Holy crap! Not only have they made the barrier to entry almost zero, they have the simplest solution imaginable (given the current state of the art). Basically after signing up, you fork a github repo with the libraries pre-assembled (there aren't many), then start coding html and javascript... Once you're ready to deploy to devices, you push.. then log into their build server and hit "update"... a few minutes later you have a set of barcodes on your screen that allow you to deploy your application to blackberry, android, ios, webos, and symbian. I'm not sure how great the blackberry, webos, and symbian applications are, but the android seems to work very well and i'm going to test ios in the near future.
Using phonegap in addition to ripple mobile emulator in chrome makes me super productive and I can use the development tools of my choosing. For now, phonegap + ripple + whatever text editor are my tools of choice and I highly recommend trying them out. As for rhomobile, guys... I'm rooting for you, but it's just too complicated and I don't have enough spare time to figure it out. Titanium.. I think you have a market in the corporate enterprise space, but you're likely to not attract many indie guys as you just seem tooo... heavy.
Anyway, having done mobile web development and knowing the pain there, as well as having put together a few android/iOs "hello world" applications, I did NOT want to go down the "build 3 different versions" road. I understand that there are compelling reasons to do this, but there aren't compelling enough to do it (in my situation).
Knowing that there are a number of solutions in this space, I narrowed it down to things that seem to have #1 the most innovation and #2 the highest potential to NOT be a dead end career wise. My list was narrowed down to titanium mobile,rhomobile, and phonegap. First off, titanium certainly has the best press corps in my opinion, the down side is that they appear to be going down the IBM path. That is, they're trying to build an "everything but the kitchen sink" heavyweight solution that is pretty off putting. In addition, the requirement to download proprietary development tools is just not where I want to go at this moment. While their solution looks very complete, I can't help but feeling it will end up being a dead end career wise. What I mean by this is that I think eventuall titanium will end up going the way of coldfusion - it will be widely used and very lucrative, but you'll be branded as a "titanium guy" for the rest of your career. For the reasons I mentioned, I actually downloaded the sdk, but didn't actually do any development using it.
Next is Rhomobile. One thing that excites me about Rhomobile AND phonegap is their distributed build system. This means I can actually build the cross platform components and NOT necessarily have the full SDK installed on my machine. Another upside to Rhomobile is that it uses ruby (a language I happen to like), but that upside quickly turns into a downside. I spent a number of hours trying to figure out how the browser components interacted with the ruby components and ultimately gave up. Rhomobile, I like the idea, but your solution is WAAAY too complicated and confusing. The other downside to Rhomobile is that same sort of "proprietary lock in" that I think will plague titanium. While I like the concept, I cannot get on board with rhomobile at this point.
Last, but certainly not least is phonegap. I actually used this for the first time almost a year ago and at that time I wasn't really impressed. An upcoming project I may take on had mentioned they're going to probably use this so I took another look. Holy crap! Not only have they made the barrier to entry almost zero, they have the simplest solution imaginable (given the current state of the art). Basically after signing up, you fork a github repo with the libraries pre-assembled (there aren't many), then start coding html and javascript... Once you're ready to deploy to devices, you push.. then log into their build server and hit "update"... a few minutes later you have a set of barcodes on your screen that allow you to deploy your application to blackberry, android, ios, webos, and symbian. I'm not sure how great the blackberry, webos, and symbian applications are, but the android seems to work very well and i'm going to test ios in the near future.
Using phonegap in addition to ripple mobile emulator in chrome makes me super productive and I can use the development tools of my choosing. For now, phonegap + ripple + whatever text editor are my tools of choice and I highly recommend trying them out. As for rhomobile, guys... I'm rooting for you, but it's just too complicated and I don't have enough spare time to figure it out. Titanium.. I think you have a market in the corporate enterprise space, but you're likely to not attract many indie guys as you just seem tooo... heavy.
Comments
Here's what I was trying to use.
Some other beefs: No way to locally debug or test or style (easily).
Only kinda-sorta ruby/rails ish, it was totally hit or miss which things worked and didn't work. I feel like it was actually a mistake to try and emulate rails because the overlap was too small.