Thanks for the super detailed write up Brion. I've been actively talking with the PhoneGap guys after doing some more research on this and it seems like a really good fit to have a consistent experience across a whole host of devices.
What were looking at is not necessarily a lot of depth in every single platform but a lot of horizontal range. Phonegap platform support beats out Titanium pretty easily there. We'll be working a lot closer with the PhoneGap team going forward to quickly have something in the android store to start. If anyone is interested in helping then we'll have plenty of opportunities to join in. Over the next weeks we'll be adding bugs and sending out more calls to get involved. --tomasz On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Brion Vibber <br...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Tomasz Finc <tf...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > >> I've been asking around on IRC but thought it would be good to open up >> to a larger audience. >> >> Has anyone here used PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/) for mobile >> app development? I'm eager to get your thoughts and potentially >> brainstorm some new ideas. >> > > I haven't used PhoneGap except for some brief testing, but I have used > Titanium Appcelerator, which is another framework in that space, in working > on StatusNet's iPhone & Android app. > > Between the two I'd recommend PhoneGap for our usage as preferable over > Titanium, but would appreciate more feedback from people who've done fuller > PhoneGap work. > > A few key differences: > > PhoneGap models around extending a full-screen web view with additional > JavaScript-accessible APIs to use device & OS capabilities (camera, address > book, notifications, etc). This gives you few/no "native widgets" for your > primary screens, but can make it relatively easy to create an HTML/JS-based > web application that's extended with native abilities and can be shipped > into native app stores. > > Titanium was originally based on a similar model, but switched to a native > widget bridging system, where your JavaScript code instantiates and > manipulates objects which are bridged to native UI components and such. This > can make your widgets look & feel more native, and can make some UI bits > faster. But it also makes behavior less consistent between platforms; many > widgets or features simply aren't available on all platforms, and last I > checked there was basically *no* working support other than iOS and Android. > (An early BlackBerry demo came out, was insufficient to do anything we > needed, and never got updated that we saw.) > > Since the Wikipedia app is mostly a webview and ...... maybe a menu? > PhoneGap is probably a good choice. Titanium can also embed a webview, but > it's a lot more work to deal with two levels of JS! PhoneGap has much > broader device support, but be warned -- it'll use the native webview on > each system, so JS and HTML/CSS support will still vary across platforms. > > > Debugging in PhoneGap basically devolves to being able to debug a web > application; various tools like http://phonegap.github.com/weinre/ can help > with this (or if you code carefully you may get away debugging your app in > your favorite desktop browser directly ;) > > > Titanium was always a bear to debug things in and basically came down to > 'watch the system log output in Android, that's the only place you'll > actually see low-level errors'; this may be better now with their IDE > support. > > Titanium also pretty aggressively pushes their support & training services > which I find offputting; their project build tool wants you to login to > their 'cloud' stuff to let you hook up to their remote build & analytics > services, which we didn't ever really use. > > Support seemed to center on getting people to take training webinars or > pointing people at the documentation and examples when they ask how to do > something; I didn't find them very responsive about platform bugs or missing > documentation except by contacting their couple of Android developers > one-on-one in IRC to ask for merges -- which was usually a pretty good > experience! Getting fixes for iOS merged was very difficult; I could never > get ahold of their iOS developers directly, and they didn't seem to be any > more responsive to low-level bugs we filed through their customer support > system. > > We had to build with a patched version of the iOS and Android runtimes for > quite some time as there were serious bugs. On the plus side, maintaining a > patched branch in git was very easy -- a lot of 'git pull origin master' and > occasionally tidying up conflicts. Their source is all on github and is easy > to fork and not too awful to build, at least for the mobile runtime. > > > Note that both PhoneGap and Titanium frameworks are open source & hosted on > github, though both require a CLA to submit code upstream. (I have signed > the Titanium CLA to submit patches to them last year; haven't done for > PhoneGap yet.) > > -- brion > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
