by Mark Giglione
Mobile Development Options - Part 4: Titanium Appcelerator & Titanium Studio
The
Titanium SDK from Appcelerator is open source (with optional “for pay”
support plans available) and basically works by cross compiling
Javascript & HTML to native mobile code (iOS XCode, Android &
others). In January 2011, Appcelerator acquired Aptana Studio (an
Eclipse based integrated development environment optimized for web
development) and the company now offers two (free) versions of the
Aptana IDE: Aptana Studio and Titanium Studio (which is optimized for
Titanium SDK projects). Titanium SDK and Titanium Studio are free and
open source but extended support is available on a paid subscription
basis from Appcelerator.
Cross
compilation is the major difference between between Titanium and
PhoneGap (see Part 3 for information concerning PhoneGap). The PhoneGap
approach is to embed a web application in a hosted native code shell
which is then compiled. The base web application code, however, remains
a combination of JavaScript, HTML and CSS which is hosted “as is” by
the PhoneGap native code shell. Titanium Appcelerator, on the other
hand, cross compiles JavaScript into a native code programming language
(e.g. Objective-C for iOS or Java for Android); a fully native code
project is created and compiled. In other words, a PhoneGap project
hosts an unaltered web application where Titanium Appcelerator
translates the Titanium JavaScript project into a standalone native code
project. Any changes or additions to the Titanium project are made to
the Javascript code in the base project which is then cross compiled to
produced updated native code source as needed. In effect, the developer
is using Javascript to create native code projects.
In
addition to Titanium, the native code programming toolset for each
target device needs to be installed; for iOS, Xcode would need to be
installed and for Android, Java and the Android SDK are required.
Titanium, however, handles accessing the native code tools
transparently; apps are either run on a desktop simulator that is
included with each set of tools or the app is deployed to a physical
mobile device. Typically the developer only interacts with Titanium or
the Titanium Studio interface which in turn transparently calls the
native code tools behind the scenes. (The developer, however, can
optionally open and edit a native code project generated by Titanium
directly if desired but this is not a common or recommended practice.)
In
theory the fully native code project produced by Titanium should run
faster than a PhoneGap project but actual comparative performance varies
with each new release of each product. Both products allow the user to
create mobile applications using web development tools and technologies
(i.e. Javascript, HTML and CSS). As with PhoneGap, there are
limitations to Titanium compared to developing directly in a native
programming language but Titanium is suitable for a range of projects up
to moderate levels of complexity.
Titanium
also allows multiple deployment targets (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.)
to be managed from a single base project (though in practice Titanium’s
support has historically tended to be more robust for iOS than for
Android). (Additionally, Titanium can also be used to build both
standalone cross platform desktop applications and mobile web sites.)
Titanium Mobile SDK
Titanium Studio
http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-studio/
