Xamarin 2 0 vs Appcelerator Titanium vs PhoneGap

Question

After all IDE evolutions  all platforms on topic are changed  of this year  i m looking to understand what is the state of technology for those platforms   What are strengths and weaknesses of each ones  There are some limitations of one of those approach   I have a good experience on C  and Javascript  than there are no programmatic language influence that could lean to one side

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There s also AppGyver Steroids that unites PhoneGap and Native UI nicely   With Steroids you can add things like native tabs  native navigation bar  native animations and transitions  native modal windows  native drawer panel  facebooks side menu  etc  to your PhoneGap app   Here s a demo  http   youtu be oXWwDMdoTCk t 20m17s

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I haven t worked much with Appcelerator Titanium  but I ll put my understanding of it at the end   I can speak a bit more to the differences between PhoneGap and Xamarin  as I work with these two 5  or more  days a week   If you are already familiar with C  and JavaScript  then the question I guess is  does the business logic lie in an area more suited to JavaScript or C    PhoneGap  PhoneGap is designed to allow you to write your applications using JavaScript and HTML  and much of the functionality that they do provide is designed to mimic the current proposed specifications for the functionality that will eventually be available with HTML5  The big benefit of PhoneGap in my opinion is that since you are doing the UI with HTML  it can easily be ported between platforms  The downside is  because you are porting the same UI between platforms  it won t feel quite as at home in any of them  Meaning that  without further tweaking  you can t have an application that feels fully at home in iOS and Android  meaning that it has the iOS and Android styling  The majority of your logic can be written using JavaScript  which means it too can be ported between platforms  If the current PhoneGap API does most of what you want  then it s pretty easy to get up and running  If however  there are things you need from the device that are not in the API  then you get into the fun of Plugin Development  which will be in the native device s development language of choice  with one caveat  but I ll get to that   which means you would likely need to get up to speed quickly in Objective-C  Java  etc  The good thing about this model  is you can usually adapt many different native libraries to serve your purpose  and many libraries already have PhoneGap Plugins  Although you might not have much experience with these languages  there will at least be a plethora of examples to work from   Xamarin  Xamarin iOS and Xamarin Android  also known as MonoTouch and MonoDroid   are designed to allow you to have one library of business logic  and use this within your application  and hook it into your UI  Because it s based on  NET 4 5  you get some awesome lambda notations  LINQ  and a whole bunch of other C  awesomeness  which can make writing your business logic less painful  The downside here is that Xamarin expects that you want to make your applications truly feel native on the device  which means that you will likely end up rewriting your UI for each platform  before hooking it together with the business logic  I have heard about MvvmCross  which is designed to make this easier for you  but I haven t really had an opportunity to look into it yet  If you are familiar with the MVVM system in C   you may want to have a look at this  When it comes to native libraries  MonoTouch becomes interesting  MonoTouch requires a Binding library to tell your C  code how to link into the underlying Objective-C and Java code  Some of these libraries will already have bindings  but if yours doesn t  creating one can be  interesting  Xamarin has made a tool called Objective Sharpie to help with this process  and for the most part  it will get you 95  of the way there  The remaining 5  will probably take 80  of your time attempting to bind a library   Update  As noted in the comments below  Xamarin has released Xamarin Forms which is a cross platform abstraction around the platform specific UI components  Definitely worth the look    PhoneGap   Xamarin Hybrid  Now because I said I would get to it  the caveat mentioned in PhoneGap above  is a Hybrid approach  where you can use PhoneGap for part  and Xamarin for part  I have quite a bit of experience with this  and I would caution you against it  Highly  The problem with this  is it is such a no mans  land that if you ever run into issues  almost no one will have come close to what you re doing  and will question what you re trying to do greatly  It is doable  but it s definitely not fun   Appcelerator Titanium  As I mentioned before  I haven t worked much with Appcelerator Titanium  So for the differences between them  I will suggest you look at Comparing Titanium and Phonegap or Comparison between Corona  Phonegap  Titanium as it has a very thorough description of the differences  Basically  it appears that though they both use JavaScript  how that JavaScript is interpreted is slightly different  With Titanium  you will be writing your JavaScript to the Titanium SDK  whereas with PhoneGap  you will write your application using the PhoneGap API  As PhoneGap is very HTML5 and JavaScript standards compliant  you can use pretty much any JavaScript libraries you want  such as JQuery  With PhoneGap your user interface will be composed of HTML and CSS  With Titanium  you will benefit from their Cross-platform XML which appears to generate Native components  This means it will definitely have a better native look and feel

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As an alternative you may want to check out BridgeIt at bridgeit mobi   Open source  it has resolved the browser performance   consistency issue discussed above in that it leverages the standard browser on the device vs  the web-view browser   It also allows you to access the native features without having to worry about app store deployments and or native containers   I ve used if for simple camera based access and scanner access and it works well for simple apps   Documentation is a bit light  Not sure how it would do on more complex apps

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Overview  As reported by Tim Anderson     Cross-platform development is a big deal  and will continue to be so until a day comes when everyone uses the same platform  Android    HTML  WebKit  iOS  Windows  Xamarin  Titanum  PhoneGap  Corona  ecc        Sometimes I hear it said that there are essentially two approaches   to cross-platform mobile apps  You can either use an embedded   browser control and write a web app wrapped as a native app  as   in Adobe PhoneGap Cordova or the similar approach taken by Sencha  or   you can use a cross-platform tool that creates native   apps  such as Xamarin Studio  Appcelerator Titanium  or Embarcardero   FireMonkey       Within the second category though  there is diversity  In particular    they vary concerning the extent to which they abstract the user   interface       Here is the trade-off  If you design your cross-platform framework you   can have your application work almost the same way on every platform    If you are sharing the UI design across all platforms  it is hard to   make your design feel equally right in all cases  It might be better   to take the approach adopted by most games  using a design that is   distinctive to your app and make a virtue of its consistency across   platforms  even though it does not have the native look and feel on   any platform    edit Xamarin v3 in 2014 started offering choice of Xamarin Forms as well as pure native that still follows the philosophy mentioned here  took liberty of inline edit because such a great answer   Xamarin Studio on the other hand makes no attempt to provide a shared GUI framework      We don   t try to provide a user interface abstraction layer that works   across all the platforms  We think that   s a bad approach that leads to   lowest common denominator user interfaces   Nat Friedman to Tim Anderson    This is right  but the downside is the effort involved in maintaining two or more user interface designs for your app   Comparison about PhoneGap and Titanium it s well reported in Kevin Whinnery blog   PhoneGap     The purpose of PhoneGap is to allow HTML-based web applications to   be deployed and installed as native applications  PhoneGap web   applications are wrapped in a native application shell  and can be   installed via the native app stores for multiple platforms    Additionally  PhoneGap strives to provide a common native API set   which is typically unavailable to web applications  such as basic   camera access  device contacts  and sensors not already exposed in the   browser       To develop PhoneGap applications  developers will create HTML  CSS    and JavaScript files in a local directory  much like developing a   static website  Approaching native-quality UI performance in the   browser is a non-trivial task - Sencha employs a large team of web   programming experts dedicated full-time to solving this problem  Even   so  on most platforms  in most browsers today  reaching   native-quality UI performance and responsiveness is simply not possible  even with a framework as advanced as Sencha Touch  Is the   browser already    good enough    though  It depends on your requirements   and sensibilities  but it is unquestionably less good than native UI    Sometimes much worse  depending on the browser    PhoneGap is not as truly cross-platform as one might believe  not all features are equally supported on all platforms     Javascript is not an application scale programming language  too many global scope interactions  different libraries don t often co-exist nicely  We spent many hours trying to get knockout js and jQuery mobile play well together  and we still have problems  Fragmented landscape for frameworks and libraries  Too many choices  and too many are not mature enough  Strangely enough  for the needs of our app  decent performance could be achieved  not with jQuery Mobile  though   We tried jqMobi  not very mature  but fast   Very limited capability for interaction with other apps or cdevice capabilities  and this would not be cross-platform anyway  as there aren t any standards in HTML5 except for a few  like geolocation  camera and local databases    by Karl Waclawek  Appcelerator Titanium  The goal of Titanium Mobile is to provide a high level  cross-platform JavaScript runtime and API for mobile development  today we support iOS  Android and Windows Phone  Titanium actually has more in common with MacRuby Hot Cocoa  PHP  or node js than it does with PhoneGap  Adobe AIR  Corona  or Rhomobile  Titanium is built on two assertions about mobile development   - There is a core of mobile development APIs which can be normalized across platforms  These areas should be targeted for code reuse   - There are platform-specific APIs  UI conventions  and features which developers should incorporate when developing for that platform  Platform-specific code should exist for these use cases to provide the best possible experience   So for those reasons  Titanium is not an attempt at    write once  run everywhere     Same as Xamarin   Titanium are going to do a further step in the direction similar to that of Xamarin  In practice  they will do two layers of different depths  the layer Titanium  in JS   which gives you a bee JS-of-Titanium  If you want to go more low-level  have created an additional layer  called Hyperloop   where  always with JS  to call you back directly to native APIs of SO  Xamarin    MVVMCross   AZDevelop net     Xamarin  originally a division of Novell  in the last 18 months has   brought to market its own IDE and snap-in for Visual Studio   The   underlining premise of Mono is to create disparate mobile applications   using C  while maintaining native UI development strategies       In addition to creating a visual design platform to develop native   applications  they have integrated testing suites  incorporated native   library support and a Nuget style component store  Recently they   provided iOS visual design through their IDE freeing the developer   from opening XCode   In Visual Studio all three platforms are now   supported and a cloud testing suite is on the horizon       From the get go  Xamarin has provided a rich Android visual design   experience  I have yet to download or open Eclipse or any other IDE   besides Xamarin   What is truly amazing is that I am able to use LINQ   to work with collections as well as create custom delegates and events   that free me from objective-C and Java limitations  Many of the   libraries I have been spoiled with  like Newtonsoft JSON Net  work   perfectly in all three environments    In my opinion there are several HUGE advantages including   native performance easier to read code  IMO  testability shared code between client and server support  although Xam could do better on bugzilla    Upgrade for me is use Xamarin and MVVMCross combined  It s still quite a new framework  but it s born from experience of several other frameworks  such as MvvmLight and monocross  and it s now been used in at several released cross platform projects   Conclusion  My choice after knowing all these framwework  was to select development tool based on product needs  In general  however if you start to use a tool with which you feel comfortable  even if it requires a higher initial overhead  after you ll use it forever    I chose Xamarin   MVVMCross and I must say to be happy with this choice   I m not afraid of approach Native SDK for software updates or seeing limited functionality of a system or the most trivial thing a feature graphics  Write code fairly structured  DDD   SOA  is very useful to have a core project shared with native C  views implementation   References and links   http   www theregister co uk Print 2013 02 25 cross platform abstraction  http   kevinwhinnery com post 22764624253 comparing-titanium-and-phonegap http   forums xamarin com discussion 1003 your-opinion-about-several-crossplatform-frameworks Comment 3334 http   azdevelop azurewebsites net  page id 181 https   github com MvvmCross MvvmCross http   pierceboggan com post 51671827932 binding-third-party-objective-c-libraries-in

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Phonegap is pretty slow  clicking a button can take up to 3 sec to display the next screen  iscroll is slow and jumpy   There other funny bugs and issues that i was able to overcome  but in total - not fully matured   EDIT  Per Grumpy comment  it is not Phonegap who is actually slow  it is the JS Browser native engine

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I have worked with Xamarin  Here are the positives and negatives I have found   Positives   Easy to code  C  makes the job easier Performance won t be a concern Native UI Good IDE  much like Xcode and Visual Studio   Xamarin Debugger Xamarin SDK is free and open-source  Wiki   Negatives   You need to know the API for each platform you want to target  iOS  Android  WP8   However  you do not need to know Objective-C or Java  Xamarin shares only a few things across platforms  things like databases and web services   You have to design the UI of each platform separately  this can be a blessing or a curse

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