

The state of HTML5 for mobile app development - jacoblyles
http://martinkou.blogspot.com/2011/06/present-state-of-html5-in-mobile-app.html

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pdaddyo
Worth pointing out that a week or so after this article was written the jquery
mobile beta was released:

[http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2011/06/20/jquery-mobile-
beta-1...](http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2011/06/20/jquery-mobile-
beta-1-released/)

I think the specific bugs he's highlighted are fixed, certainly on the
platforms we're testing on.

~~~
p_monk
No, actual persistent headers and footers are still not possible with the
beta. They are possible with the experimental scrollview element. Personally,
I find jquery mobile to be fairly useless without the scrollview element.
Sencha touch has a scrollview, but the author doesn't mention that the only
reason sencha touch has had any success is that it's scope is more narrow than
jquery mobile's -- sencha only works on webkit browsers. Creating a scrollview
element in a webkit browser is a fairly trivial task. Creating a scrollview
that will work on a windows phone is more difficult, and this kind of problem
is whats hindering jquery mobile's progress, but getting it right will ensure
that jquery mobile will be the dominant mobile framework come 6 months from
now.

~~~
yllus
I've been using a framework called ChocolateChip-UI that allows for persistent
headers (and footers, with a very minor hack) plus almost everything else
you'd want. I'm using it to build a Twitter client for the BlackBerry
PlayBook.

Check it out: <http://www.chocolatechip-ui.com/>

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mrtrombone
Has anyone else played with the dojo mobile framework? It is rarely mentioned
in these type of articles. We started using it mainly for business reasons but
after playing with it for a while it seems to me to have a lot more
functionality than jquerymobile and the speed of new features getting into the
nightlies is pretty impressive

~~~
ryanhuff
I haven't tried dojo Mobile in a project, but the demos on their website are
either extremely slow or not functional on my duel core android phone.

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geuis
This is an excellent summarization and well reflects my own experiences
building mobile apps with Phonegap. I found that while Appcelerator is an
interesting platform, it takes the developer too far away from the core
capabilities of the mobile device. By this I mean that you have many options
using their custom JavaScript API, but you get little control over the final
product.

Conversely, while I ended up using Phonegap for a couple of published apps, I
quickly ran into the limitations inherent of that framework. One big example
was the desire to play video (either remote or local). The feature simply
doesn't exist in the framework.

Despite the lack of features in some aspects, phonegap is still my preferred
framework because it's extensible. I get the benefit of rapid development
using html5, CSS, and js while being able to edit or add objective-c code
where needed to make extra stuff work.

My final conclusions were that Phonegap is good for phase 1 apps or apps that
are relatively simple. Native apps are the way to go if you expect high
performance.

~~~
DougWebb
What PhoneGap does (expose Javascript APIs for direct hardware/native library
access) isn't very difficult, so if you needed to you could add-on for
anything PhoneGap is missing. The real value of PhoneGap is that they've done
this work on a bunch of different devices, and set up dev environments for
each of them. That's a lot of coding you don't have to do if you need to
support many devices.

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nickzoic
I've just been using Chromium browser on a small window on my desktop.

It has a really excellent JS debugger (with breakpoints and watches and so on)
and acts enough like Mobile Safari that most of what I've been trying to do
works just the same.

Wouldn't help much with "exciting" apps, but for information-driven stuff it
works well.

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kevingadd
He says "it’s easy to debug and make changes" when referring to mobile HTML5
development, but my experiences have been the complete opposite and the only
concrete claim he makes to support this is that there's a buggy and slow tool
you can use to run Web Inspector against a remote device. It doesn't even look
like it has breakpoints. Am I missing some other essential tool that he
assumes the reader knows about?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I was going to make the same comment. Frankly, I barely find gdb to be
adequate for debugging iOS code (lackluster support for Obj C 2.0 properties,
etc). The idea of having to debug a significant amount of JS inside of a
native app shell without a real debugger gives me chills.

~~~
mamp
The big hope is that XCode 4.2 reduces the overhead (i.e. suck less) of
Objective-C through LLVM & LLDB's improved debugger, more static checking and
automatic reference counting.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Concur, but so far I haven't seen much improvement with 4.1, which, I believe,
is also using llvm by default for new projects.

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dreamdu5t
It's a joke. The are no crossbrowser frameworks because standards are non-
existent, phones can't handle scrolling long lists, and are too underpowered
for CSS animations. Really, there is no such thing as a mobile web app,
there's only mobile webpages.

