Mobile apps are all the rage now, but to create cutting edge solutions on mobile platforms, at least for now, you need to adopt native development. So, as I have an idiosyncrasy for Java and never developed on (not even used) an Apple platform, and lacking a real motivation to start, until now I kept myself away from this field.
Last week though, after reading once again acouple of inspiring article on Hacker News, I started thinking that trying out one of the various cross platform, javascript based solutions for mobile development on a lightweight app could be a pleasant distraction from my current main (night) projects. I even started fantasizing that, if it was really possible to create a web app using just “html5″ technologies, I could have been able to create a complete app (without too much polish) over just one weekend.
A fairly simple yet useful candidate for a lightweight app was to create a mobile front end for my adjustable rate mortgage calculator. Since all the complicated financial stuff is done on the server, and I already created a simplified web service for the free embeddable version (widget), if I could really use the usual web technologies on the phones my “aggressive” (ie, crazy) deadline seemed feasible.
So this is why, on a Friday evening after my day job, I started studying in depth all those solutions that I had just lazily kept an eye on during the last months. I think that what I learned can be interesting to others, so I’ll expose my findings here.
My requirements for the ideal development platform were simple: To be as close as possible to usual web development, good enough for the job at hand, able to work on both Android and the iPhone, and possibly free or at least very cheap (as this was just a side show).
After some hours doing a literature review (ie, googling around), I came up with a short list of three candidates:
The order of the above list isn’t random. The first combination (Phonegap + JQM) was, on paper, my perfect solution: Based on JQuery, it really is web development for the phone, and it would have allowed me to even reuse part of my current code base.
Sencha Touch is another “html5″ solution (meaning that it creates html GUI objects, not native ones), and from what I read it is quite faster than JQM, but on the downside GUIs have to be created procedurally – something I started hating with the MFC, and never got myself to like.
Last, Appcelerator Titanium is javascript based, but it uses native controls. This should guarantee the best performance of the three, but, in addition to having only procedural GUI programming like Sencha, this also means that things sometimes have to be different on Android and on iOS, so this isn’t cross-platform of the “write once-run anywhere” kind. And, last but not least, I had found an alarming article about some nasty memory leaks that seemed almost a show stopper (that’s why I used the square brackets on the list – at one point Appcelerator was more out of the list than in).
There were also other interesting propositions (like rhomobile – I love Ruby), but they looked less viable for one reason or another and I won’t go over them here.
What I wrote until now is only based on my “literature review”. With my preferences made up, I decided to try the Phonegap/JQM solution hands on.
Setting everything up was easy enough. The problems came when I tried the “kitchen sink” test app on my Android phone (HTC Wildfire). The performance was terrible, and the rendering often incorrect. The same happened with a showcase app downloaded from the Android Market.
So, that was it for me. As much as I wanted this solution to work, my conclusion is that it is just not production ready yet, at least not for my goals and not for the current generation of not high-end phones. Good bye, reuse of existing code…
I then went on to Sencha. This time, I wanted to check the performance before doing any installation. So I looked for any success story for Sencha on Android, and luckily I found a very recent and very relevant article on techcrunch. When I read that “… it wasn’t easy, performance was a huge issue [and] at times it took days to figure out, and simple things like too much logging and poorly constructed ‘for’ loops actually made our app unusable during our journey.” I didn’t feel very optimistic.
So I installed on my phone the Diary app from the android market. Better than JQM, but still sluggish and with layout problems on my screen size too. And this after a long and painful optimization work, according to the article… not for me, not now. So, Sencha too wouldn’t fit my requirements.
At this point I was pretty disappointed, as I saw my fantasy of being able to complete an app over the weekend slipping away from my grasp. But, not wanting to give up, I decided to look better into Appcelerator: At stake was not only my simple app, but the possibility to develop more interesting ones in the near future!
First of all, I decided to take a look at the existing Titanium-based apps. Among their showcases there are many more iOS apps than Android ones, but I was able to install a couple of good examples on my phone; GetGlue, in particular, looked and felt really good.
But what about the memory leaks? After some more search, I found out that you can avoid them following some guidelines (see the comments in the alarming article) and, if still necessary, using some workarounds that would be perfectly acceptable for my current needs. I’m also pretty confident that in time Appcelerator will fix these problems (if they want to stay in business).
In the end, I downloaded the Titanium Studio and started coding. So far things went pretty smoothly, and, even if I didn’t create my full app over one weekend, I already solved 70% of the technical obstacles – it can already get the needed input from the user, send it to the server, get the response, and show some data in simple pure html bar graphs. What is still missing is a lightweight enough solution to show the payments time series, but I’ll start on that as soon as I have time.
What I learned from this very industrious weekend is that the news about the impendingdeath of native app coding are greatly exaggerated, and that (surprise, surprise!) a LOT of what you read all over the internet about the marvels of html5 development is BS. But I also learned that, even if there are no silver bullets flying around, developing for mobile in a pretty much cross platform way with just one programming language is indeed possible, and that procedural GUI programming, on the simple UIs that you can create on phones, isn’t as painful as I remembered from developing fully fledged desktop applications.
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