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: 187

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

Scaling Human Judgment: How Dropbox Uses LLMs to Improve Labeling for RAG Systems

To improve the relevance of responses produced by Dropbox Dash, Dropbox engineers began using LLMs to augment human labelling, which plays a crucial role in identifying the documents that should be used to generate the responses. Their approach offers useful insights for any system built on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

By Sergio De Simone

AWS Introduces Nested Virtualization on EC2 Instances

AWS recently announced support for nested virtual machines within virtualized EC2 instances running KVM or Hyper-V. A long-awaited feature by the community, the new option enables use cases such as app emulation and hardware simulation on supported C8i, M8i, and R8i instances.

By Renato Losio

Standardizing Post-Quantum IPsec: Cloudflare Adopts Hybrid ML-KEM to Replace Ciphersuite Bloat

Cloudflare has extended hybrid post-quantum encryption to IPsec and WAN traffic, standardizing its SASE stack ahead of the NIST 2030 deadline. By adopting a streamlined ML-KEM key exchange, the move addresses long-standing "ciphersuite bloat" in quantum-resistant IPsec. The update aims to neutralize "harvest now, decrypt later" threats without requiring specialized hardware upgrades.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

New Research Reassesses the Value of AGENTS.md Files for AI Coding

Despite widespread industry recommendations, a new ETH Zurich paper concludes that AGENTS.md files may often hinder AI coding agents. The researchers recommend omitting LLM-generated context files entirely and limiting human-written instructions to non-inferable details, such as highly specific tooling or custom build commands.

By Bruno Couriol

Architecting for Global Scale: Inside DoorDash’s Unified, Composable Dasher Onboarding Platform

DoorDash has rebuilt its Dasher onboarding into a unified, modular platform to support global expansion. The new architecture uses reusable step modules, a centralized status map, and workflow orchestration to ensure consistent, localized onboarding experiences. This design reduces complexity, supports market-specific variations, and enables faster rollout to new countries.

By Leela Kumili

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service