2. Agenda
• Brief introduction to various native mobile application development
platforms
• Limitations of native apps
• What are hybrid apps?
• What is Sencha Touch?
• What is PhoneGap?
• Putting it all together
• Pros and cons of the hybrid application development approach
• Doubts and queries
• And then we EAT!
3. Mobile app development platforms
• iOS(iPhone/iPod/iPad)
– Objective-C using xCode as IDE
• Android
– Java ME, ADT (Android Development Toolkit) using Eclipse as IDE
• Blackberry
– Java ME, Blackberry SDK using Eclipse as IDE
• Windows Phone
– C#, VB.net using Visual Studio 2010 as IDE
• Symbian, BADA, webOS
– I dont know
4. Limitations of native apps
• Portability across multiple platforms
• Managing multiple code bases
5. What are hybrid apps?
• Web for the rescue
• Hybrid apps
– A hybrid application (hybrid app) is one that
combines elements of both native and Web
applications
6. What is Sencha Touch?
• Sencha Touch is a user interface (UI) JavaScript library, or
framework, specifically built for Mobile Web.
• It can be used by Web developers to develop user
interfaces for mobile web applications that look and feel
like native applications on supported mobile devices.
• It is fully based on web standards such as HTML5, CSS3
and JavaScript
7. What is PhoneGap?
• PhoneGap is an open-source mobile development framework
produced by Nitobi, purchased by Adobe Systems.
• It enables software programmers to build applications for mobile
devices using JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, instead of lower-level
languages such as Objective-C.
• The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither
truly native (all layout rendering is done via the webview instead of
the platform's native UI framework) nor purely web based (they are
not just web apps but packed for appstore distribution, and have
access to part of the device application programming interface).
8. How do these two guys work together?
Native Application
Accelerometer
webview
Camera
Network
Index.html Connection
Contacts
Device Info
Capture Device
Events
Sencha Phone File System
Touch Gap
Geolocation
Media
Database
Storage
9. Benefits
• Single codebase (for most of the time) for
multiple platforms
• Consistent UI across platforms
• Managing native resources such as file system,
databases are taken care of by PhoneGap library
• Reduced learning curve and development time*
10. Drawbacks
• Although it can have single codebase across platform,
for certain capabilities developers have to rely on
native implementation. (e.g.: Providing a camera view
within an application is not yet possible using a hybrid
app. Developers still have to rely on native code)
• Consistent UI across platforms
• Not ideal for creating applications which are heavily
dependent on Phone hardware
• Debugging a hybrid application can be a little bit tough
