To work on Titanium Appcelerator or PhoneGap what are the skills required?

I understand that to use these technologies we need to know javascript and HTML 5. Bu开发者_如何学运维t should we know iPhone or Android to work on this?

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Not necessarily. They provide this layer of abstraction that makes your life so much easier. Be forewarned though. Since you're using this additional layer of abstraction, a lot of features you implement could possibly seem sluggish. For example - I tried implementing google maps for android using PhoneGap. Took me 5 lines of code. But it was sluggish to the point where it almost became unusable.

Also, this layer of abstraction does not support every feature both the iphone & android have to offer. You might want to take this into consideration while planning out your app.

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Take a look at engadgets app for iphone. Yesterday with a fresh install of snow leopard and iOS 4.3 sdk and no prior knowledge of using appcelerator, I had the same look and feel of their initial page and content page (clicking on a news item) within 3 hours. This was using procedural code and getting the data from a php backend.

I then moved over to coding the app the same way as tweetanium. I'm getting zero performance issues and the app is running the same speed as my other apps compiled in objective C.

My app is going to be very complex: paypal, camera, geolocation, facebook/twitter integration, maps, user state-mgmt and lots of other things. At the moment, I don't think it will be an issue, but lets see tho.

I haven't yet come across any limitations, but I will be updating this comment as time goes on.

I would go titanium rather than phone gap. Remember they have only recently released their own dev studio which is great to work with. Who knows what it will be like within a year of updating. Same goes for working with Android, Blackberry and WP7 (although they don't support that yet.)

P.S I've only got JS coding knowledge, no JAVA or Objective C.

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If you mean the iPhone or Android framework, then not really.

Titanium has a very nice demo named Kitchensink where all functionality is previewed. I didn't have any experience with the iPhone framework and it worked out great for me.

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Whenever you do an application more complex than a normal Hello World, or the show-case apps for the cross platform tool, you tend to get stuck on details requiring that you have knowledge of the underlying system anyway.

In my experience trying to get away from learning Android and iOS by using cross-platform tools strikes back quite fast. And you end up required to learn both the underlying platforms, and the complex internals of the cross-platform tool in order to get stuff done.

So if going for a cross platform tool you are most likely to:

• Have to learn all underlying platforms, and the cross-platform tool. In more depths than if you went with native from the start.
• Apps that do not feel at home on any platform.
• Funky performance drops for no apparent good reason.
• Worse development and debug tools than the native tools provide.
• Possible show stoppers beyond your control when/if Android/iOS is updated.

I am yet to see an app written using any cross-platform tool that I could not have implemented a better version of (and most likely faster) using native tools.

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I'm currently building an app in appcelerator titanium targeting ios only. I had no previous knowledge about ios native development (and project goals didn't allow enough time to get into it). We had someone else working on Android already. My impression is that there are certainly limitations, but if you don't have enough resources to develop natively it's a good alternative. All depends on the app though.

As far as phonegap vs appcelerator -- last time I checked (that may have changed) phonegap was all purely about webviews. Meaning you create it just like you would create a website (html, js, css, etc) and then it has a look and feel of a mobile site except no browser chrome. Appcelerator has webviews as well, but their selling point is that you can write everything in js and they translate it into obj c with native look and feel.