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Comment by pingswept | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how this performs, but at first appearances, it looks pretty good. Does anyone know what the major competitors are for mobile UI libraries?

I played around with an early version of Sencha Touch, but that's all I'm familiar with.

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Here are a few others:

Sencha Touch: http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/

jQTouch: http://www.jqtouch.com/

iui: http://www.iui-js.org/

Jo: http://joapp.com/

And Spine Mobile: http://spinejs.com/mobile

(disclaimer - I'm the author)

Can you clarify if Spine is actually cross platform (at least to Android if not elsewhere)? A statement of such is conspicuously lacking from the web site, leading me in combination with the giant oversized iPhone pic to believe it is probably not. If it is, you could do yourself a favor and make it more clear.

Feels snappy but the demos feel a bit incomplete.. On my phone (iOS5) the address bar not receeding in particular spoils the top two examples.

Is it any good?

dojoMobile: http://dojotoolkit.org/features/mobile.php xUI: http://xuijs.com/ Zepto (i think it's done by scriptaculous creator): http://zeptojs.com/

PhoneGap tools site has others too: http://phonegap.com/tools/

Sencha Touch 2 is in developer preview now. It has a steep learning curve but I think it is worth it.

The fixed toolbars (as well as other performance advantages) are why I initially started using Sencha Touch instead of jQuery mobile. I'm sad to see where this 1.0 release is. I've been expecting working fixed toolbars for a long time. Sencha nailed this a long time ago, and it's a basic necessity.

The learning curve isn't THAT steep. Sencha Touch is well documented, and there are tons of example apps. There's a bit of a gap between the basic example apps and a full featured mobile app, but the documentation covers that all pretty well.

Regardless of the learning curve, it's worth the effort for javascript mobile development. Sencha Touch 1.0 was miles ahead of this release, and 2.0 is even further ahead.

We attempted to do a project with jQM and dumped it in favor of Sencha. The performance just isn't there for anything but the most trivial apps. Sencha has a significantly steeper learning curve (jQM is mostly markup while Sencha apps are mostly JavaScript-generated) but performance is much better. And performance is pretty important on mobile devices.

Yep we came to the same conclusions for the app I'm currently working on. jQM's ease of use lends itself well to rapid prototyping but when you want build something slick, go with Sencha.

There's a nice Mobile Frameworks Comparison Chart at http://www.markus-falk.com/mobile-frameworks-comparison-char...

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