Hacker News Reader

Comment by kronholm | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious in how you put Titanium next to PhoneGap (Disclaimer: I may be reading too much into that, or not understanding your meaning - 2nd language etc.).

My experience with Titanium is that you code in js or Alloy, then when building and deploying, you get native code, with native elements and everything.

Comparing it to PhoneGap, which purely runs in a slowish WebView isn't quite fair I think. Or has your experience been different?

View on HN

You are absolutely right: It's been a while since I last used Titanium. At the time you had to use a crappy/buggy UI to compile your app, with random bugs ocuring all the time, not being able to build once you've upgraded to a newer version due to backwards incompatible changes and more weird incompatibility bugs with other versions of XCode, and so on. I hated the experience since I couldn't rely on being able to building my app and Objective C library support wasn't available at the time or didn't work very well. I quitted using Titanium once they switched from their own buggy UI to Eclipse for building, my code was backwards incompatible, the UI couldn't compile to older versions of Titanium, I had enough. It's true, it has better performance as say a Phonegap, but it did have some weird layout issues from time to time which were hard to fix. Overall I think it's a nice product for creating an app without learning Objective C but I won't use it for a clients app any more, too unreliable.

Oh, and yes, it is 'cross-platform', except for the fact that there are so many things not working on Android (either bugs or non supported in the API for Android) that you need a seperate build for android to make it reasonably useful.

This is al based on my experience with Titanium Mobile from around 2 years ago, so it might be better now.

I think you're right to make this distinction. Titanium doesn't belong in the 'wrappers' family and would be better grouped with other 'cross-platform native' solutions like Xamarin [1], perhaps a 4th category in parent's list.

[1] http://xamarin.com/

Titanium is still not quite the same as Xamarin. Xamarin cross-compiles to fully native code from my understanding. Titanium, on the other hand, has JavaScript-to-native bindings i.e. a TiView is a JavaScript object which proxies UIView on iOS.

All business logic is still running in JavaScript. In fact, Titanium spins up a V8 engine just to run your app. This may be fine for the most simple apps, but if you need to kick off a long running operation to a background thread, for example, you're in for some gymnastics.

I'd rather have Grand Central Dispatch, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, etc. all at my disposal. Using Titanium felt very restrictive. Their API is a one-size-fits-all between iOS/Android/etc. As soon as you want to step out of that least common denomination, you've got to write native modules. Which, if the people on your team don't know native development, can be a problem.

Have you got experience with Titanium? How is it? I've had a few clients inquire about mobile applications as of late and I'd like to start exploring options for me as a web developer.

There's a slight learning curve, but it's overall very nice to work with. Been making a living from it for a year now, so I'm rather comfortable with it.

You have to get in a kind of different mindset than with HTML, where you use div's for everything - here you create windows and views - but shouldn't take more than a couple days to get dangerous with it :)

There's a few quirks though - differences between iOS/Android for a small number of things, when coding, which can take up a lot of your time to troubleshoot.

An example of such an issue can be on Android, an imageView which you've applied rotation to, suddenly appears to be not rotated, if you put a backgroundColor on it as well as rounded corners. The fix here could be to use a regular view instead, and use a backgroundImage. Thankfully those kinds of weird things aren't as plentyful any longer, the company behind, Appcelerator, are in my experience pretty helpful and fast with bugfixes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com