10 Useful Frameworks To Develop HTML-Based Webapps for Touch Devices
In the last two years the rapid growth and diffusion of touch devices such as iOS or Android based platforms has forced developers and web designers to rethink the model of their own webapps for the new “touch experience” introduced by the iPhone in 2007.
During this period several frameworks have been released to help web developers implement quickly applications for this kind of touch devices. Here is a collection of some useful frameworks to develop easily HTML-based webapps that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet touch platforms.
Titanium – Appcelerator Titanium is a free and open source framework to develop easily native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. It provides developers with over 100 customizable UI controls for native tables, views, tabs, alerts, dialogs, buttons, support for geolocation, social networks and multimedia.
Sencha Touch – Sencha Touch is a HTML5 mobile app framework that allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touchscreen devices. It supports HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility, and optimization in developing your web applications.
Sproutcore Touch – Sproutcore Touch is the touch edition of the Sproutcore framework for developing HTML 5 web applications that includes complete support for touch events and hardware acceleration on the iPad and iPhone.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is another interesting open source framework for building cross-platform mobile apps with web standars (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript). This framework supports geolocation, vibration, accelerometer, camera, orientation change, magnetometer and other interesting features for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm.
Rhodes – Rhodes is another excellent open source framework to rapidly build native apps for all major smartphone operating systems (iOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android). It supports GPS geolocation, PIM contact reading and writing, and camera image capture.
iUI – iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing advanced mobile webapps for iPhone and comparable/compatible devices.
iWebkit – iWebkit 5 is the new version of the popular ultralight framework for easily creating iPhone and iPod touch applications. The current release has new improved features and is really easy to understand in order to develop in just a few minutes your own web apps.
XUI – XUI is another javascript framework for building simple web applications for mobile devices. No much documentation available but it worth to try it for not complex apps.
jQPad – jQPad is an iPad web development framework jQuery based with some features for quickly developing simple iPad applications.
jQuery Mobile – Closing I want to suggest you jQuery Mobile, the touch-optimized version of the popular jQuery framework for smartphones and tablets which will allow you to design a single highly branded and customized web application that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet platforms. The framework will support iOs, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and other devices. The framework is under development and will be available in late 2010.
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Great list Antonio! I’ve been messing around with mobile development and several of these frameworks for the last several months, and I’ve found that each have their strengths and weaknesses. The one I’ve used the most is Rhodes, and it’s worth pointing out that the main draw of Rhodes is its offline syncing capabilities, meaning you can write and app that will go and download info from a database and store it locally on the device, so that you can use it when not connected to the net. Didn’t see that listed in your summary, thought I’d contribute it. Thanks!
How could you possibly miss out on jQTouch….
Hi, Thanks for the posting this kind of quality post. This blog is giving me latest update about the Technology. Thank you very much once again.
… and why do you show a closed-source propietary API machine on the pic? :((
Best made “touch applications”, as you name them :), are created with global frameworks.
Code once, run everywhere.
Thanks!
jQTouch is a plugin, not a framework
@Akshay,
JQtouch has now moved on to Sencha Touch
How ’bout Cappuccino? Its a framework developed by 280North. It combines Cocoa and Objective C to form a new language Objective-J. It looks very promising and rumor has it that the company was just bought by Motorola: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/24/motorola-snaps-up-280-north-for-20-million/
Relevant websites:
280North – http://www.280North.com
Cappuccino – http://cappuccino.org/
Will Dojo Toolkit work work for touch devices?
Just another framwork for mobile and more …
http://www.zkoss.org/product/zkmobile.dsp
This seems to be mostly a list of HTML/CSS/Javascript styling libraries for mobile web apps. And its useful for that.
Just an FYI that Rhodes is a framework for native smartphone apps not mobile web apps. Rhodes is an MVC framework for building native apps (the only MVC framework among those listed and one of only three listed that are for building native apps). Rhodes lets you do your views in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, the controllers are done in Ruby. In this sense it can use styling libraries such as IUI, JQTouch, Sencha and the rest of those for its view optimization. To that end we actually ship with a modified version of JQTouch that we made work on Android (out of the box JQTouch doesn’t work there).
We also have many more features than those listed: barcode reading, signature capture, native iPhone-like mapping for all devices, and, most uniquely, support for synchronized offline data.
Use any of these frameworks for building mobile web apps. Use Rhodes if you want to build a native app using your web skills.
Currently on the market, the use of ITO materials resistive touch screen and capacitive touch screen the most widely used.
from november we’ve got the jquery touch. i don’t know about the other frameworks but the jquery touch is superb
dude I was just looking for an HTML /css framework. these frameworks are for mobile apps, not web sites. The #1 step in the “getting
Started” guide for PhoneGap for instance was “Buy a mac” I’m not goign to buy a mac to make a HTML web site work better on a cell phone. I’m making mobile apps I’m making web sites. All that touch crap works already there’s no need to add all the other stuff unless I’m making an app.
Others on this seem to be just interested in selling training on how to use their product, instead of making a frame work that needs no training. What kind of moron buys into that?
Anyway if anyone could point me towards something that just helps speed up the process of making HTML web sites more readable on mobile devices let me know. don’t tell me I’ll have to make my own frame work and kick all theses guys butts… I don’t have time for that right now.
If you’ll forgive the plug there’s also my new book, HTML5 for iOS and Android, which enables you to take web apps created in HTML, JavaScript & CSS, and turn them into standalone apps that you can upload to the app stores (for free or to sell). See http://html5formobile.com – the wrappers to do this for the iOS and Android SDKs are freely available on the website, and you don’t need any knowledge of either programming language if you follow the instructions in the book.
foneFrame is a mobile framework built with HTML5 + CSS3 that creates mobile pages for smartphones like Android & iPhone. Lightweight & extensible. http://www.QRdvark.com/foneFrame/
there are so many frameworks to use the HTML based applications.. but the most effective and useful were described above .. so we can say this is so much useful.concept
Hey, you funk soul brothers! Check out Application Craft http://applicationcraft.com
jQuerymobile has announced AC as a jqm dev platform and here’s a case study that Phonegap did on them : http://phonegap.com/case_study/phonegap-application-craft-pain-free-mobile-app-development/
In summary, it is a cloud-based dev platform that does mobile (all important platforms) and desktop on an equal footing. It’s got an IDE that does drag-and-drop / wysiwyg UI building as well as code editing. I guess you could describe it as Visual Basic in the Cloud, but Javascript not Basic. Widget based like VB was, extensible. Open Source with free platform offering.
Also, @antonio , i found a great mobile frameworks comparison chart here: http://www.markus-falk.com/mobile-frameworks-comparison-chart/
Great post!
Here is a complete summary of ‘HTML5 App Frameworks’
http://www.rivellomultimediaconsulting.com/html5-app-frameworks/