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: 172

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

ArkType Introduces ArkRegex with Type Safe Regular Expressions

Introducing ArkRegex: a revolutionary drop-in for JavaScript's RegExp that ensures type safety in regular expressions without runtime overhead. Seamlessly integrate with native features like capture groups and receive robust type inference, revolutionizing TypeScript development and eliminating runtime failures. Simplify regex with confidence—experience ArkRegex today!

By Daniel Curtis

350PB, Millions of Events, One System: Inside Uber’s Cross-Region Data Lake and Disaster Recovery

Uber’s HiveSync is a sharded, cross-region batch replication system keeping Hive/HDFS data consistent across multiple regions. Handling 5M daily Hive events and 8PB of data replication, it uses event-driven jobs, hybrid RPC and DistCp strategies, DAG-based orchestration, and dynamic sharding, enabling disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, and 99.99% cross-region data accuracy.

By Leela Kumili

Cloudflare Launches ‘Code Orange: Fail Small’ Resilience Plan After Multiple Global Outages

Cloudflare recently published a detailed resilience initiative called Code Orange: Fail Small, outlining a comprehensive plan to prevent large-scale service disruptions after two major network outages in the past six weeks.

By Craig Risi

Presentation: Holistic Engineering: Organic Problem Solving for Complex Evolving Systems

Vanessa Formicola discusses how "invisible" forces shape our code and architecture. She shares patterns like "Cirque du Soleil coding" and "Shared Kitchen Sinks," explaining why technical problems often have social roots. Architects and leaders will learn how to use Social Decision Records (SDRs) and holistic modeling to make the implicit explicit and drive success.

By Vanessa Formicola

Podcast: Why Engineering Culture Is Everything: Building Teams That Actually Work

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado about the central role of engineering culture, measuring team health through qualitative metrics, and learning from other engineering disciplines.

By Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service