Comparison between Corona Phonegap Titanium

Question

I am a web developer and I want to move my web products to iPhone  One of the products is like Google Maps  show map on the phone screen  you can drag or resize the map and view some information that we add to the map   I know there are some technologies that enables you to use HTML  CSS and Javascript to develop native iPhone apps   I ve identified a few    Ansca Mobile PhoneGap Appcelerator   Are there other  similar products   What are the differences between them   Which should I choose

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For anybody interested in Titanium i must say that they don t have a very good documentation some classes  properties  methods are missing  But a lot is  documented  in their sample app the KitchenSink so it is not THAT bad

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I registered with stackoverflow just for the purpose of commenting on the mostly voted answer on top  The bad thing is stackoverflow does not allow new members to post comments  So I have to make this comment more look like an answer   Rory Blyth s answer contains some valid points about the two javascript mobile frameworks  However  his key points are incorrect  The truth is that Titanium and PhoneGap are more similar than different  They both expose mobile phone functions through a set of javascript APIs  and the application s logic  html  css  javascript  runs inside a native WebView control    PhoneGap is not just a native wrapper of a web app  Through the PhoneGap javascript APIs  the  web app  has access to the mobile phone functions such as Geolocation  Accelerometer Camera  Contacts  Database  File system  etc  Basically any function that the mobile phone SDK provides can be  bridged  to the javascript world  On the other hand  a normal web app that runs on the mobile web browser does not have access to most of these functions  security being the primary reason   Therefore  a PhoneGap app is more of a mobile app than a web app  You can certainly use PhoneGap to wrap a web app that does not use any PhoneGap APIs at all  but that is not what PhoneGap was created for  Titanium does NOT compile your html  css or javascript code into  native bits   They are packaged as resources to the executable bundle  much like an embedded image file  When the application runs  these resources are loaded into a UIWebView control and run there  as javascript  not native bits  of course   There is no such thing as a javascript-to-native-code  or to-objective-c  compiler  This is done the same way in PhoneGap as well  From architectural standpoint  these two frameworks are very similar    Now  are they any different  Yes  First  Titanium appears to be more feature rich than PhoneGap by bridging more mobile phone functions to javascript  Most noticeably  PhoneGap does not expose many  if any  native UI components to javascript  Titanium  on the other hand  has a comprehensive UI APIs that can be called in javascript to create and control all kinds of native UI controls  Utilizaing these UI APIs  a Titanium app can look more  native  than a PhoneGap app  Second  PhoneGap supports more mobile phone platforms than Titanium does  PhoneGap APIs are more generic and can be used on different platforms such as iPhone  Android  Blackberry  Symbian  etc  Titanium is primarily targeting iPhone and Android at least for now  Some of its APIs are platform specific  like the iPhone UI APIs   The use of these APIs will reduce the cross-platform capability of your application   So  if your concern for your app is to make it more  native  looking  Titanium is a better choice  If you want to be able to  port  your app to another platform more easily  PhoneGap will be better    Updated 8 13 2010  Link to a Titanium employee s answer to Mickey s question       Updated 12 04 2010  I decided to give this post an annual review to keep its information current  Many things have changes in a year that made some of the information in the initial post outdated   The biggest change came from Titanium  Earlier this year  Appcelerator released Titanium 1 0   which departed drastically from its previous versions from the architectural standpoint  In 1 0  the UIWebView control is no longer in use  Instead  you call Titanium APIs for any UI functions  This change means a couple things    Your app UI becomes completely native  There is no more web UI in your app since the native Titanium APIs take over control of all your UI needs  Titanium deserves a lot of credit by pioneering on the  Cross-Platform Native UI  frontier  It gives programmers who prefer the look and feel of native UI but dislike the official programming language an alternative    You won t be able to use HTML or CSS in your app  as the web view is gone   Note  you can still create web view in Titanium  But there are few Titanium features that you can take advantage of in the web view  Titanium Q amp A  What happened to HTML  amp  CSS  You won t be able to use popular JS libraries such as JQuery that assume the existence of an DOM object  You continue to use JavaScript as your coding language  But that is pretty much the only web technology you can utilize if you come to Titanium 1 0 as a web programmer    Titanium video  What is new in Titanium 1 0   Now  does Titanium 1 0 compile your JavaScript into  native bits   No  Appcelerator finally came clean on this issue with this developer blog Titanium Guides Project  JS Environment  We programmers are more genuine people than those in the Marketing department  aren t we   -    Move on to PhoneGap  There are not many new things to say about PhoneGap  My perception is that PhoneGap development was not very active until IBM jumped on board later this year  Some people even argued that IBM is contributing more code to PhoneGap than Nitobi is  That being true or not  it is good to know that PhoneGap is being active developed     PhoneGap continues to base itself on web technologies  namely HTML  CSS and JavaScript  It does not look like PhoneGap has any plan to bridge native UI features to JavaScript as Titanium is doing  While Web UI still lags behind native UI on performance and native look and feel  such gap is being rapidly closed  There are two trends in web technologies that ensure bright feature to mobile web UI in terms of performance    JavaScript engine moving from an interpreter to a virtual machine  JavaScript is JIT compiled into native code for faster execution  Safari JS engine  SquirrelFish Extreme Web page rendering moving from relying on CPU to using GPU acceleration  Graphic intensive tasks such as page transition and 3D animation become a lot smoother with the help of hardware acceleration  GPU Accelerated Compositing in Chrome   Such improvements that are originated from desktop browsers are being delivered to mobile browsers quickly  In fact  since iOS 3 2 and Android 2 0  the mobile web view control has become much more performing and HTML5 friendly  The future of mobile web is so promising that it has attracted a big kid to town  JQuery has recently announced its mobile web framework  With JQuery Mobile providing UI gadgets  and PhoneGap providing phone features  they two combined creates a perfect mobile web platform in my opinion   I should also mention Sencha Touch as another mobile web UI gadget framework  Sencha Touch version 1 0 was recently released under a dual licensing model that includes GPLv3  Sencha Touch works well with PhoneGap just as JQuery Mobile does   If you are a GWT programmer like me   you may want to check out GWT Mobile  an open source project for creating mobile web apps with GWT  It includes a PhoneGap GWT wrapper that enables the use of PhoneGap in GWT

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I ve tried corona  It was good until I discovered it doesn t support streaming mp3 audio  So  I stopped right there  I think if I really want to be an iphone app developer I should learn obj c  All I wanted to make an app which has a list of radio stations and you click on them it start playing

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native mapkit is supported in Titanium

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Here s a more recent and in depth analysis of Appcelerator and PhoneGap  http   savagelook com blog portfolio a-deeper-look-at-appcelerator-and-phonegap  And here s even more detail on how they differ programmatically   http   savagelook com blog portfolio phonegap-is-web-based-appcelerator-is-pure-javascript

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Rhomobile Rhodes  http   rhomobile com products rhodes  is very similar in approach to PhoneGap  but is the only framework with    a Model View Controller pattern  as most web frameworks provide  an Object Relational Manager support for all popular smartphones  including Windows Phone 7  a hosted development service  not just hosted build   http   rhohub com a full debugger and SDK-less emulator in the RhoStudio IDE support for synchronized offline data

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My understanding of PhoneGap is that they provide Javascript APIs to much of the iPhone APIs   Titanium seems easier for a web developer background   It is a simple XML file to create a basic TabView application and then everything in the content area is controlled by HTML   JS   I also know that Titanium does provide some javascript access to some of the frameworks  particularly access to location information  the phone ID  etc    UPDATE  Titanium added Maps API in version 0 8 of their framework

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Of the solutions you mentioned  none of them appear to give you direct access to the MapKit framework introduced in OS 3 0   As the Google Maps HTML widgets aren t nearly as good as MapKit  see Google Latitude for an example   you are probably best off developing a native Cocoa touch application  or choosing a solution you can extend to add MapKit integration   PhoneGap is extensible in this manner  it s open-source so it is by default   and some of the other solutions might be as well   edit  Titanium now has support for MapKit

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I have been working with Titanium for over a week now and feel like I have a good feel about its weakness   1  If you hoping you use the same code on multiple platforms good luck  You ll see something like backgroundGradient and be amazed until you find out android version doesn t support it  Then have to revert to using a gradient image  might as well use it for both versions to make the code easier right   2  A lot of weird behaviors  on the Titanium android sdk you need to understand what a  heavy  window is just to get the back button to work  or even better orientation event tracking  This isn t how the android platform really is  its just how Titanium tries to make their API work   3  Your thrown in the dark  Things will crash and you have to start to comment code and then when you find it  never use it  There are certain obvious bugs  like orientation and percents on android that have been a problem for over six months    4  Bugs      there are a lot of bugs and they will be reported  sit around for months  get fixed in a few days  I am surprised they even are planning to release a black berry mobile sdk when there are so many other problems with android   5  Titanium Iphone versus Titanium Android javascript engines are completely different  On android version you can download remote javascript files  include and use libraries like mootools  jquery and so on  I was in heaven when I found this out because I didn t have to keep compiling my android app  The android apk installation process takes so long  Iphone none of that is possible  also the iphone version has a much faster javascript engine    If you stay away from a lot of the native UI parts  i e instead use setInterval to detect orientation changes  sticking with gradient images  forget about the back button  build your own animations  forget window header  toolbars  and dashboard  You really can make an api that works on both that doesn t require of lot of rewriting  But at that points its just as sluggish as a webapp   So is it worth it  After all the pain  its worth every minute  You can abstract the logic and just build different UI for each rather then if elseing everywhere  Titanium lets you make fluid applications  that feel fast  You lose the powerful layout abilities of each platform but if you think simple  things can get done under a single language   Why not a web app  On entry level market android phones its horribly slow to generate a webview and consumes a lot of memory you could be using to do more complex logic

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From what I ve gathered  here are some differences between the two    PhoneGap basically generates native wrappers for what are still web apps  It spits out a WhateverYourPlatformIs project  you build it  and deploy  If we re talking about the iPhone  which is where I spend my time   it doesn t seem much different from creating a web app launcher  a shortcut that gets its own Springboard icon  so you can launch it like  like  a native app   The  app  itself is still html js etc   and runs inside a hosted browser control  What PhoneGap provides beyond that is a bridge between JavaScript and native device APIs  So  you write JavaScript against PhoneGap APIs  and PhoneGap then makes the appropriate corresponding native call  In that respect  it is different from deploying a plain old web app  Titanium source gets compiled down to native bits  That is  your html js etc  aren t simply attached to a project and then hosted inside a web browser control - they re turned into native apps  That means  for example  that your app s interface will be composed of native UI components  There are ways of getting native look-and-feel without having a native app  but    well    what a nightmare that usually turns out to be    The two are similar in that you write all your stuff using typical web technologies  html js css blah blah blah   and that you get access to native functionality through custom JavaScript APIs   But  again  PhoneGap apps  PhonGapps  I don t know    is that a stupid name  It s easier to say - I know that much  start their lives as web apps and end their lives as web apps  On the iPhone  your html js etc  is just executed inside a UIWebView control  and the PhoneGap JavaScript APIs your js calls are routed to native APIs   Titanium apps become native apps - they re just developed using web dev tech   What does this actually mean    A Titanium app will look like a  real  app because  ultimately  it is a  real  app  A PhoneGap app will look like a web app being hosted in a browser control because  ultimately  it is a web app being hosted in a browser control    Which is right for you    If you want to write native apps using web dev skills  Titanium is your best bet  If you want to write an app using web dev skills that you could realistically deploy to multiple platforms  iPhone  Android  Blackberry  and whatever else they decide to include   and if you want access to a subset of native platform features  GPS  accelerometer  etc   through a unified JavaScript API  PhoneGap is probably what you want    You might be asking  Why would I want to write a PhoneGapp  I ve decided to use the name  rather than a web app that s hosted on the web  Can t I still access some native device features that way  but also have the convenience of true web deployment rather than forcing the user to download my  native  app and install it   The answer is  Because you can submit your PhoneGapp to the App Store and charge for it  You also get that launcher icon  which makes it harder for the user to forget about your app  I m far more likely to forget about a bookmark than an app icon    You could certainly charge for access to your web-hosted web app  but how many people are really going to go through the process to do that  With the App Store  I pick an app  tap the  Buy  button  enter a password  and I m done  It installs  Seconds later  I m using it  If I had to use someone else s one-off mobile web transaction interface  which likely means having to tap out my name  address  phone number  CC number  and other things I don t want to tap out  I almost certainly wouldn t go through with it  Also  I trust Apple - I m confident Steve Jobs isn t going to log my info and then charge a bunch of naughty magazine subscriptions to my CC for kicks   Anyway  except for the fact that web dev tech is involved  PhoneGap and Titanium are very different - to the point of being only superficially comparable   I hate web apps  by the by  and if you read iTunes App Store reviews  users are pretty good at spotting them  I won t name any names  but I have a couple  apps  on my phone that look and run like garbage  and it s because they re web apps that are hosted inside UIWebView instances  If I wanted to use a web app  I d open Safari and  you know  navigate to one  I bought an iPhone because I want things that are iPhone-y  I have no problem using  say  a snazzy Google web app inside Safari  but I d feel cheated if Google just snuck a bookmark onto Springboard by presenting a web app as a native one   Have to go now  My girlfriend has that could-you-please-stop-using-that-computer-for-three-seconds look on her face

User · Answer

The Corona SDK  Ansca Mobile  uses Lua as its coding language  See lua org for more about Lua   While we plan to add further web integration and native-UI elements  our focus will tend to be on graphics-intensive applications  such as game development  as opposed to web-based technologies  In other words  we don t envision people writing Corona apps entirely in Javascript HTML CSS

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You should learn objective c and program native apps  Do not rely on these things you think will make life easier  Apple has made sure the easiest way is using their native tools and language  For your 100 lines of javascript I can do the same in 3 lines of code or no code at all depending on the element   Watch some tutorials - if you understand javascript then objective c is not hard  Workarounds are miserable and apple can pull the plug on you anytime they want

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Making HTML5 widgets tha look like iphone widgets is one thing  but making them perform equally well is another matter altogether  Performance of html5 animations  even plain View Transitions   scrolling long lists  responsiveness to gestures feel sticky and jerky  An iPhone user will notice the difference   There s also some differences in the kinds of gestures that are supported by different devices which results in platform specific code and usability issues as well    I ll stay with native apps for now I guess

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I m taking a course in Android iPhone development and we spent 8 weeks with Titanium  not full time   Version was Titanium 1 4 2 and time was around November 2010   Here is my experience   iPhone Android dual targetting  Even though the API guides claim that the functionality is available for both the Android and iPhone  this is not the case  Much of the stuff simply don t work on one of the platforms  Some things works differently    A lot of the people in the class has done iPhone applications  and they can not make them work on Android without major rewrites  I developed a simple childrens app called Animap  see android market   Appstore in Sweden  and started developing under Windows  Once the Android target was working I opened the project on OS X  It does not show any build stuff for iPhone  just for Android  You need to start a dual target project under OS X   Ok  I copied the relevant files to a new project   Next problem - the animations does not work on iPhone  they work on Android   The scrolling events does not work the same on the iPhone   i e on Android you get the untouch event when user stops scrolling and releases their finger from the screen  this does not happen on the iPhone     Since this is not mentioned somewhere you basicly need to do trial and error programming on first one platform  then on the other platform  By trial and error I mean it will take about two days to get such a simple App as Animap working on the other platform  You will also need to have if  android  then    or if iphone     all over your code      Download and setup  You must follow the instructions to the letter   Do not try to use java 64 bit  It will not compile the KitchenSink 1 4 0 demo application   1 3 works OK   You must put files directly on the C drive as long pathnames will make the external program not receiving all command line parameters if they get to long   Fine for small programs though  1 3 of the times  the toolchain simply stops and you must press  launch  again  Then it will probably work    very unreliable   The simulator will not be found on startup and then you must simply kill of adb exe with Ctrl Alt Delete and retry   Network connection  On a wifi-network you sometimes looses the live connection and Titanium crashes on you  the compile deploy interface   If you do not have a working internet connection it will not start as it can not log you in to their servers    API  CSS  HTML and jQuery is a breeze compared to this  Titanium resembles any other old GUI API  and you need to set some properties for every single button field etc  Getting a field wrong is just to easy  remembering all the properties that needs to be set  Did you spell it with capital letters at the right place   as this is not caught by the compiler  but will be seen as a runtime error if you are lucky to test that part   In Titanium things simply break when you add another view on top of a control or click somewhere else in the GUI    Documentation  Several API pages carry the Android symbol  but will only return a null when you try to create the control  They are not simply available on the Android platform despite the symbols  Sometimes Android is mention to not support a particular method  but then the whole API is missing    KitchenSink  The demo application  Did I mention it does not compile if you put it in your Eclipse project folder because the path gets too long  Must be put on your C drive in the root folder  I currently use a symbolik link  mklink  J       Undocumented methods  You must propably use things as label setText  Hello World   to change a label reliable but this is not documented at all    Debugging  Titanium API info  Printouts are the only way to debug     Editing  The APIs are not available in any good format so you can not get ordinary code-completion with help etc  in Eclipse  Aptana please help out   Hardware  It seems that the compiler tools are not multithreaded so a fast computer with a fast harddrive is a must  as you must do a lot of trial  amp  error  Did I mention the poor documentation  You must try out everything there as you can t trust it   Some positive things   Open Source From previous projects I have promised myself never ever to use closed source again as you can t simply fix things just by throwing hours and manpower at it  Important when you are late in the project and need to deliver for a hard deadline  This is open source and I have been able to see why the tool chain breaks and actually fix it as well   Bugdatabase It s also open  You can simply see that your not alone and do a workaround instead of another 4 hours spent on trial amp error   Community Seems to be active on their forums     Bugs   Titanium 1 4 is not threadsafe  That means if you make use of threads  use the url  property in a createWindow call  and program like the threads are working and send events with data back and forth you run into a lot of very  very strange stuff - lost handlers  lost windows  too many events  too few events  etc  etc  This is all dependent on the timing  putting the rows of code in different order might crash or heal your application  Adding a window in another file js breaks your app js execution    This also trashes internal datastructures in Titanium  as they sometimes can update internal datastructures in paralell  overwriting a just changed value with something else    Much of the problems I have had with Titanium comes from my background on realtime systems like OSE who support hundreds of threads  events and message passing  This is supposed to work in Titanium 1 4 but it simply doesn t do it reliably     Javascript  which is new to me  dies silently on runtime errors  This also means that small and common bugs  like misspelling a variable name or reading in a null-pointer does not crash when it should so you can debug it  Instead parts of your program just stop working  for instance an eventhandler  because you misplaced misstyped a character   Then we have more simple bugs in Titanium  like some parameters not working in the functions  which is quite common on the Android platform at least    Trial and Error debug cycle speed Having run Titnium Developer on several computers  I noticed that the bottleneck is the harddrive  An SSD drive on a laptop makes the build cycle about 3-5 times faster than on a 4200 rpm drive  On a desktop  having dual drives in RAID 1  striping mode  makes the build about 25 percent faster than on a single drive with a somewhat faster CPU and it also beats the SSD drive laptop     Summary   From the comments in this thread there seems to be a fight for the number of platforms a tool like this can deliver app s for  The number of API seems to be the key selling-point     This shines through very much when you start using it  If you look at the open bugtracker you see that the number of bugs keeps increasing faster than the number of fixed bugs  This is usually a sign that the developers keep adding more functionality  rather than concentrating on getting the number of bugs down    As a consultant trying to deliver rather simple apps to multiplatforms for a customer - I m not sure this is actually faster than doing native app development on two platforms  This is due to the fact that when you are up to speed you are fast with Titanium  but then suddenly you look down and find yourself in a hole so deep you don t know how many hours must be spent for a workaround  You can simply NOT promise a certain functionality for a certain deadline time cost    About myself  Been using Python for two years with wxPython   that GUI is inconsitent  but never breaks like this  It might be me that have not understood the threading model used by Javascript and Titanium  but I am not alone according to their open discussion forums  GUI objects are suddenly using the wrong context not updating       before that I have a background in C and ASM programming for mobile devices    edit - added part with bugs and not being thread safe   Edit - now having worked with it for a month   mostly on PC but some on OS X as well  Added iPhone and Android dual targetting  Added Trial and Error debug cycle speed

[iphone] Comparison between Corona, Phonegap, Titanium

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