Anyone had experience with time-saving toolkits for Mobile Development?

I've done both iOS programming for iPad/iPhone and Android programming. All in the native platforms - Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android.  Conversion between the two is much easier than porting to basic or an other non-C-derived language, but still takes no small amount of effort.

There are toolkits that claim to make the development and porting much easier.  Specifically, MonoTouch by Novel and a tool called Sencha-touch.

Does anyone have an experience with these?

My past experience with toolkits that claim to save time has been much to the opposite.  Generally there is less initial development time, but maintainence becomes clumsy and cumbersome.

Any thoughts?

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dan Woods on May 27, 2012 at 8:41pm

But why not use phonegap?

Permalink Reply by Nemanja Nesic - NEM- on May 27, 2012 at 8:41pm

Take a look at PhoneGap http://phonegap.com/

Permalink Reply by Kevin Neelands on May 28, 2012 at 8:28am

Have you used phonegap?  And if you did. did it save man-hours in the long run?

Permalink Reply by Richard Dean on May 28, 2012 at 11:17am

Yes, I would also like to hear about other's experience with PhoneGap.

Kevin Neelands said:

Have you used phonegap?  And if you did. did it save man-hours in the long run?

Permalink Reply by Jackie Gleason on May 28, 2012 at 2:10pm
Phone gap and titanium are good although you would have to follow their convention. I would say givin you are used to working in a c-based language you just use c then just implement the UI in objective-c or java. Or even better use a open gl es based UI library then it will run on both (basically what some frameworks do). I have been toying lately with the idea of using node native modules compiled for arm but I am still working on that.


P.S. you can compile objective c natively on android but not all the cocoa libraries (uikit) are open sourced yet.
Permalink Reply by Vlad Sanchez on May 28, 2012 at 2:21pm

Check out Corona. Although it is mostly used for game development, I've known many people using it for database applications lately. I've attended their last Meetup and it was an inspiring experience.

I personally was looking to overcome the fragmentation issues. After the meetup I realized there are no silver bullets. It's even a topic many people avoid talking about.

I hope this helps. Try Corona, it's free to try and very cheap to use commercially.

Permalink Reply by Jackie Gleason on May 28, 2012 at 6:36pm
Corona looks interesting but -1 for needing to buy and -1 for not having a responsive website

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