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?

Views: 170

Replies to This Discussion

But why not use phonegap?

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

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?

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.

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.

Corona looks interesting but -1 for needing to buy and -1 for not having a responsive website

RSS

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Anthropic Finds LLMs Can Be Poisoned Using Small Number of Documents

Anthropic's Alignment Science team released a study on poisoning attacks on LLM training. The experiments covered a range of model sizes and datasets, and found that only 250 malicious examples in pre-training data were needed to create a "backdoor" vulnerability. Anthropic concludes that these attacks actually become easier as models scale up.

By Anthony Alford

Cloudflare Proposes Merkle Tree Certificates to Solve Post-Quantum TLS Performance Issue

Cloudflare's innovative Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) revolutionize WebPKI, enabling a seamless transition to Post-Quantum (PQ) cryptography without performance penalties. By minimizing TLS handshake overhead and integrating Certificate Transparency, MTCs promise enhanced security while addressing latency concerns, paving the way for future-ready internet security.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Java News Roundup: New Jakarta AI Specification, GlassFish, Spring RCs, Infinispan 16, Open Liberty

This week's Java roundup for November 3rd, 2025, features news highlighting: a new Jakarta AI specification; the fourteenth milestone release of GlassFish 8.0; second release candidates of Spring Boot 4.0, Spring for GraphQL 2.0 and Spring Batch 6.0; the release of Infinispan 16.0; and the November 2025 edition of Open Liberty.

By Michael Redlich

CodeClash Benchmarks LLMs through Multi-Round Coding Competitions

Researchers from Standford, Princeton, and Cornell have developed a new benchmark to better evaluate coding abilities of large language models (LLMs). Called CodeClash, the new benchmark pits LLMs against each other in multi-round tournaments to assess their capacity to achieve competitive, high-level objectives beyond narrowly defined, task-specific problems.

By Sergio De Simone

Presentation: Growing and Cultivating Strong Machine Learning Engineers

Vivek Gupta shares best practices for managing and mentoring ML engineers, from early-career development to senior leadership growth. He breaks down the crucial, distinct skills for Production Machine Learning, including data/model management, building training pipelines, LLM prompt evaluation, privacy/security, and integrating human-in-the-loop processes for reliable, scalable AI systems.

By Vivek Gupta

© 2025   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service