Titanium is an open source framework that allows developers to build native desktop apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It provides APIs for common desktop tasks and supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The demo app shown takes a screenshot using the Titanium.Desktop.takeScreenshot API and displays it, illustrating how Titanium can be used to create basic desktop applications.

1. Titanium Desktop
writing native desktop apps with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and friends.

2. About Me
Marshall Culpepper
Titanium Project Lead / Hacker Extraordinaire
@marshall_law
http://www.arcaner.com
mculpepper@appcelerator.com
http://github.com/marshall

3. Agenda
• What is Titanium?
• High Level Architecture, Runtime
• API Overview
• Guided Lab: Screengrabber

4. What is Titanium?
• An open source framework for building native apps
using web technologies
• Titanium Desktop: Windows, OSX, Linux
• Titanium Mobile: iPhone, Android
http://appcelerator.com
http://github.com/appcelerator
@appcelerator
#titanium_app on irc.freenode.net

5. Motivation
• Single Site Browsers (Fluid, Prizm)
• Adobe AIR
• Cross platform GUI toolkits (Qt, wxWidgets, XUL,
GTK)
• Dynamic Languages (Ruby, Python, Javascript)
• Binding layers (Jython, Rhino, JavaScriptCore)
• Next gen web tech: HTML5, Gears, CSS3
• ... And lots of caffeine!

6. Titanium Desktop
• UI with HTML5, CSS, Canvas. The best of the open web.
• Support for Javascript, Ruby, Python (PHP coming soon)
• Languages can be intermixed automatically.
• Native desktop functionality at your fingertips.
• Titanium.* APIs are available in all languages
• Windows (XP/SP2 -> 7), OSX (10.5->10.6, Universal), Linux
(Debian based distros, Fedora, SuSE)

7. Desktop Architecture

8. The Desktop Runtime
• Fully configurable distribution options:
• “Bundled” : Runtime is packaged with your app, no seperate
installer
• “Network Install”: A native installer downloads dependencies
on demand
• Remove modules you don’t need to cut down on binary size
• Reuse the runtime already on the user’s machine
• Runtime size: OSX: ~17MB, Win32: ~15MB

9. UI and Notification APIs

10. Filesystem API

11. Network API

12. Database API
Synchronous and Asynchronous (HTML5) APIs

13. Process API
Launch processes, read/write from pipes

14. And much more..
• Web Workers: Multi-threading for Javascript
• Desktop: Take screenshots, open URLs, applications
• Comprehensive language support:
• Javascript (WebKit / close to trunk -- blazing fast)
• Ruby 1.8.6 (1.9 with GVL coming soon)
• Python 2.5.4 (2.6 coming soon)
• PHP 5.3 (in development)
• Lua (in development)
• C/C++ Native bindings
• Java / C# planned post-1.0

15. Useful Resources
• Check out some of my demo apps:
• http://github.com/marshall/screengrabber
• http://github.com/marshall/quicksnap (Uses Ruby)
• Desktop testsuite (Drillbit)
• Full API doc: http://codestrong.com
• Support forums: http://support.appcelerator.net

16. Titanium Developer
• Used for creating, managing, packaging and testing
your native apps.
• Requires sign-up for Appcelerator Network (forum
support, e-mail list, other services)
• Is actually a Titanium app!

17. Obligatory “Hello World”
Using the sandbox to quickly test and run code

18. Screengrabber: Our first app
• An app that takes a screenshot, and shows it to the user
• App walkthrough:
• Create the project in Developer
• Overview of config files, manifest, app layout
• Quickly roundtrip prototype, show off debugging, etc

19. Step 1: Configuration
• $ROOT/tiapp.xml
• Configure Windows, and their properties

20. Step 2: HTML, CSS, JS
• clean out $ROOT/index.html
• make a JS script, a CSS stylesheet

21. Step 3: Write the JS
• APIs we need from Titanium:
• Titanium.Desktop.takeScreenshot(“path/to/file”)
• Titanium.Filesystem.getFile() / getDesktopDirectory()

22. Step 4: App!

23. Packaging
• Once your app is written, you can use our cloud services to
package and distribute your app.
• Automatically packages with the config you specify, for
the platforms you want to support
• Built-in analytics to track who’s using your app,
downloads, etc

24. Wrapping it up
• Current release: 0.6
• 0.7 scheduled for end of Sept., 1.0 GA soon after
• Come visit IRC for help, or to chat us up
• #titanium_app on irc.freenode.net
• Extra credit: using Python, Ruby during the hack session
• And now, Lunch!