On 04/17/2012 01:51 AM, rtweed wrote:
Mobile web frameworks are something I've spent a lot of time working
with and researching for several years, pretty much from their
earliest days, so perhaps I can provide a bit of insight that may be
helpful.
appreciate your insights -
our initial plan is to be agile - mostly server side template rendering
(node + mongodb) which we know well and can bang out fast to pass the
"fail fast" stage - then upgrade to more client side / native stuff in
version 2
so, in this approach does it make any sense to use the lower learning
curve jQTouch to get something out there asap, and migrate to Touch v2
later if warranted ?
ps: nice auto "folding" on your web site
Just to be clear, I am independent of all the key framework
development companies and what follows are my own opinions based on my
own R&D and experience.
I would class Sencha Touch (particularly the latest v2) as the current
"Rolls Royce" of mobile web frameworks. Actually Sencha Touch was an
offshoot of jQTouch - the original core developer of JQTouch was hired
by Sencha and the ExtJS framework architecture was adapted to create
Sencha Touch.
I've not really been impressed by jQuery Mobile, but then I'm
personally not a big fan of jQuery generally. The general view is
that jQuery Mobile is focussed more on mobile web *sites*, while
frameworks like Sencha Touch are all about emulating the Native App
experience (both iOS and Android) via the capabilities of WebKit
mobile browsers, HTML5& CSS3.
As other posters have noted, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with
the Sencha licensing policy, though, unlike ExtJS, Sencha Touch has a
free license even for commercial use (interestingly Sencha changed
licensing of Sencha Touch to a free license when they announced v1.0
and at that time jQuery Mobile was beginning to make a buzz - most saw
this as a defensive move by Sencha to stop people defecting)
JQTouch is somewhat more rudimentary compared with Sencha Touch and is
a bit of a back-water these days. It's much more CSS3 and tag
orientated compared with Sencha Touch's pure Javascript approach.
That makes it simpler to learn and use but it does tend to have
limitations compared with Sencha Touch. Whilst Sencha Touch attempts
(pretty impressively) to work across both iOS and Android platforms,
JQTouch (certainly in the past) tended to focus on iOS Native App look
and feel.
n my opinion, the one to watch is Dojo Mobile which, whilst still in
its relatively early days, seems to be doing a lot of good stuff in a
very nice way. There are, of course, a growing number of other
frameworks appearing, but I personally would stick with the big guys
who have been in this sector for many more years and who understand
the many nasty devils that lurk in the detail. As with all software,
anyone can create 80% of what's needed in pretty quick time. It's
that remaining 20% that kills them and frustrates the hell out of
potential users.
In summary, for now, my view is that Sencha Touch is the leader by a
long way. Yes it has a steep learning curve. Their documentation is
improving these days and they have done a great job of harmonising the
ExtJS and Sencha Touch 2 API architecture, concepts and syntax.
As commented elsewhere, I've done quite a bit of work on abstracting
and automating the use of both Sencha Touch and ExtJS, but my work is
currently focused on their integration with the GT.M and Cache
databases - though I have plans to open that up in the future by
virtue of the ewdGateway Node.js module. In the meantime, if you
don't use (or want to uee) those databases, I'm afraid you'll have to
climb that steep learning curve, but the reward is a very cool set of
mobile web capabilities
Rob
On Apr 16, 2:28 pm, "john.tiger"<[email protected]> wrote:
we've tried using JQuery Mobile but it's way too buggy (and note all the
unanswered posts on the forum which is not a good sign)
Sencha Touch seems popular but looks complex to use with a node
framework so looking at JQTouch (I guess it's some sort of off-shoot
from Sencha). We want to keep things as simple as possible.
any experiences / suggestions ?
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