Titanium's Appcelerator - A Cross Platform Mobile Development Platform Worth Looking Into

by Steve Nellon Software Developer

The open source development platform, Titanium Appcelerator enables the creation of native applications through web technologies like CSS, JavaScript and HTML. This environment is extensible and creates beautiful apps that can be used across various OSs as well as mobile devices that include Blackberry, iOS and Android, along with HTML5 and hybrid. The open source SDK has more than 5000 mobile as well as device operating system APIs, Cloud services, MVC framework called Alloy and powerful IDE based on Eclipse called Studio. Community developers are provided with unmatched ability for the creation of quality mobile web, rich hybrid or quality native applications in every platform from just one code base, with the use of JavaScript.

cross platform mobile application development

Benefits

Web oriented- The application has been developed with the help of web technologies which accounts for the help that it extends in the development when a web service and the app interact. This not only simplifies the development process but saves the overhead that is required for elaboration of exchanged information through remote communication. Using JSON format for transferring of data is one typical example. The simple encoding of objects that are JavaScript-like is known as JSON or JavaScript Object Notation; since Titanium is pure JavaScript API you simply have to assign the received data from network to local variable but without writing any data parsing, conversion or extraction.

Rapid prototyping- The application development is actually accelerated by virtue of Titanium Appcelerator since the creation can done very flexibly with just a few code lines, in very few hours; normally it would have required a few days as well as a lot more attention. Regardless of the type of toolkit, Titanium can help you make prototypes for evaluation of user and UI interaction through its rapid development facilitation.

Growing community- The community of Appcelerator contains 200,000+ developers, all of whom have used the tool for building of more than 35,000 apps. Open Mobile Marketplace has also been launched for selling, sharing as well as buying of modules, design elements, templates along with web services extensions. In fact, the community has managed to attract important investments with recent acquirement of Cocoafish for implementation of cloud functionality as well as services in the platform.

Cross-platform- This cannot be said to be a guaranteed, automatic feature; you have to conduct base development on any one of the platforms and then the necessary measures have to be implemented so that the app functions on the other as well. However, the benefits are but obvious; two separate languages need not be learned which makes it possible for you to reach a good code reusability level.

JavaScript- This is a language that is known by many developers, enabling even more developers who belong from web development background to approach mobile app development. Even more important is the fact that Titanium has the intrinsic feature of scripting languages that are prototype-based, combination of structure and flexibility.

When you use Titanium as framework you suffer some downsides as well like lack of a wide support. Another problem is the bad performance of a few user interface components when compared to their native counterparts. Despite the claims, all native device functionality and APIs are not supported by it.

Just like everything else, Titanium Appcelerator has its own sets of pros as well as cons. However, the cons should not discourage people from using this framework as the number of clear benefits is too much to ignore. Each case should dictate the way it is evaluated for usage since specific projects considered by you decide whether the framework is fit for usage or not. Overall this great option should be considered when starting new projects since it is one mobile development platform that has a huge future and is certainly worth looking into. You can get in touch with a cross platform mobile application development company who can help you develop mobile apps for multipe platforms that are stable, scalable and secure.

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