{"id":4208,"date":"2011-04-18T07:39:21","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T06:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/4208-native-apps-better-than-web-apps-thats-silly-talk-says-phonegap-president.html"},"modified":"2011-04-18T07:39:21","modified_gmt":"2011-04-18T06:39:21","slug":"native-apps-better-than-web-apps-thats-silly-talk-says-phonegap-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/4208-native-apps-better-than-web-apps-thats-silly-talk-says-phonegap-president.html","title":{"rendered":"Native apps better than web apps? That\u2019s silly talk says PhoneGap president"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I attended Mobile World Congress in February one of my goals was to explore the merits of the various different approaches to writing cross-platform mobile apps. One of the key ones is PhoneGap<\/a>, and I got in touch with Nitobi\u2019s president and co-founder Andr\u00e9 Charland. As it turned out he was not at that particular event, but he kept in touch and I spoke to him last week.<\/p>\n

PhoneGap works by using the installed HTML and JavaScript engine on the device as a runtime for apps. That is not as limiting as it may sound, since today\u2019s devices have high performance JavaScript engines, and PhoneGap apps can be extended with native plug-ins if necessary. But aren\u2019t there inconsistencies between all these different browser engines?<\/p>\n

\n

Sure, it\u2019s kinda like doing web development today. Just a lot better because it\u2019s just different flavours of WebKit, not WebKit, Gecko, whatever is in IE, and all sorts of other differentiation. So that\u2019s definitely how it is, but that is being overcome rather quickly I\u2019d say with modern mobile JavaScript libraries. There\u2019s JQuery Mobile, there\u2019s Sencha Touch, there\u2019s DoJo Mobile just released, SproutCore, which is backed by Strobe, which is kinda the core of Apple\u2019s MobileMe.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s tons of these things, Zepto.js which is from the scriptaculous guy, Jo which is a framework out of a Palm engineer, the list of JavaScript frameworks coming out is getting longer and longer and they\u2019re getting refined and used quite a bit, and those really deal with these platform nuances.<\/p>\n

At the same time, phone manufacturers, or iOS, Android, WebOS, and now RIM, they\u2019re competing to have the best WebKit. That means you\u2019re getting more HTML5 features implemented quicker, you\u2019re getting better JavaScript performance, and PhoneGap developers get to take advantage of that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

says Charland. He goes further when I put to him the argument made by native code advocates – Apple CEO Steve Jobs among them<\/a> \u2013 that PhoneGap apps can never achieve the level of integration, the level of performance that they get with native code. Will the gap narrow?<\/p>\n

\n

I think it will go away, and people will look back on what they\u2019re saying today and think, that was a silly thing to say.<\/p>\n

Today there are definitely performance benefits you can get with native code, and our answer to that is simply that PhoneGap is a bundle made of core libraries, so at any point in your application that you don\u2019t want to use HTML and JavaScript you can write a native plugin, it\u2019s a very flexible, extensible architecture … So you can do it. We don\u2019t necessarily say that\u2019s the best way to go. Really if you\u2019re into good software development practices the web stack will get you 90%, 95% of the way there, so that apps are indistinguishable from native apps.<\/p>\n

Some of the native features we see in iOS apps, they\u2019re reminiscent of Flash home pages of ten years ago, sure you can\u2019t do it in HTML and JavaScript but it doesn\u2019t add any value to the end user, and it detracts from the actual purpose of the application.<\/p>\n

The other thing is, a lot of these HTML and JavaScript things, are one step away from being as good in a web stack as they are in native. When hardware acceleration gets into WebKit and the browser, then performance is really just as good.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Charland is also enthusiastic about Adobe\u2019s recent announcement<\/a>, that PhoneGap is integrated into Dreamweaver 5.5:<\/p>\n

\n

Two things are exciting from our perspective. It gives us massive reach. Dreamweaver is a widely used product that ties in very nicely to the other parts of the creative suite toolchain, so you can get from a high-level graphic concept to code a lot quicker. Having PhoneGap and JQuery Mobile in there together is nice, JQuery Mobile is definitely one of the more popular frameworks that we see our community latching on to.<\/p>\n

The other thing is that Dreamweaver targets a broader level of developer, it\u2019s maybe not super hard core, either Vi or super-enterprise, Eclipse guys, you know, it\u2019s people who are more focused on the UI side of things. Now it gives them access to quickly use PhoneGap and package their applications, test them, prove their concepts, send them out to the marketplace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He says Adobe should embrace HTML and Flash equally.<\/p>\n

I also asked about Windows Phone support, and given that Microsoft shows no sign of implementing WebKit, I was surprised to get a strongly positive response:<\/p>\n

\n

We have something like 80% of the APIs in PhoneGap running on Windows Phone already. That\u2019s open and in the public repo. We are just waiting basically for the IE9 functionality to hit the phone. The sooner they get that out in public, the sooner we can support Windows Phone 7. We have customers knocking at our door begging for it, we\u2019ve actually signed contracts to implement it, with some very large customers. Just can\u2019t there soon enough, really. I think it\u2019s an oversight on their part to not get IE9 onto the phone quicker.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

PhoneGap is at version 0.94 at the moment; Charland says 0.95 will be out \u201cin a few weeks\u201d and he is hoping to get 1.0 completed by O\u2019Reilly OSCON<\/a> in July.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve posted nearly the complete transcript of my interview, so if you are interested in Charland\u2019s comments on building a business on open source, and how PhoneGap compares to Appcelerator\u2019s Titanium, and what to do about different implementations of local SQL on devices, be sure to read the longer piece<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I attended Mobile World Congress in February one of my goals was to explore the merits of the various different approaches to writing cross-platform mobile apps. One of the key ones is PhoneGap, and I got in touch with Nitobi\u2019s president and co-founder Andr\u00e9 Charland. As it turned out he was not at that … Continue reading Native apps better than web apps? That\u2019s silly talk says PhoneGap president<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,56,67,80,94,95,96],"tags":[463,499,500,501,514,522,586,599,719,912,955],"class_list":["post-4208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adobe","category-mobile","category-professional","category-software-development","category-visual-studio","category-web-2","category-web-authoring","tag-html5","tag-ios","tag-ipad","tag-iphone","tag-javascript","tag-jquery","tag-microsoft","tag-mobile","tag-phonegap","tag-titanium","tag-visual-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}