jQTouch now Sencha – Mobile web app development

Those familiar with iPhone/iTouch optimized websites might have heard of or seen a jQTouch site. Created by David Kaneda, it was the first and only jquery-based mobile web toolkit to make mobile sites have the same look and feel as native iPhone apps.

A new trend in native apps was to create a mobile web app and use Phonegap to be the native wrapper and submit it to the AppStore. Several apps such as Keypoint , Harmonious , and Beer in Japan are based on jQTouch.

Recently David Kaneda has joined the Ext JS company, and they have renamed the company Sencha and have Sencha Touch, the first HTML5 Mobile App Framework for iOS and Android.

They have three full featured demos, GeoCongress, Solitaire and Kiva, which look outstanding and function very well on my iPhone 3GS and scale perfectly for the iPad.

The assumption is that these apps will still be able to be wrapped up by PhoneGap to produce native apps to submit on the AppStore and Android Marketplace.  While the framework is still in beta, there is no commerical license yet.  There is an open source license, so all web apps and web apps wrapped in a native wrapper must be compatible with the GNU GPL license v3.

As the battle between smartphones continue we will see some fail (ahem, Palm webOS) and some team together to corner the market (currently iPhones and Android – 90% of market). However, no one wants to create multiple versions of their site or application. The universal app across different mobile operating systems is the ultimate goal and one step closer thanks to Sencha.

Key features:

  • Flexible Themes
  • Resolution Independent
  • Animations (Slide, Fade, Cube, etc.)
  • Touch Events – swipe, double tap, tap, etc.
  • Standards Based (HTML5, CSS3, Javascript)
  • Data Integration (JSON, AJAX, YQL)

Below are some screenshots of some examples if you download Sencha.

My prediction is you will see a lot of webapps and even native apps starting to use this framework as it speeds up development time and breaks Apple’s developer strangle-hold!

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About Delan De Silva

Delan is a tech geek at heart and lives and sleeps with his iPhone. Into computers since Atari days, always fascinated with the productivity and usefulness of software. Currently works in the IT industry and deals with large scale IT projects. Drop me a line via email or find me on Twitter @meshwerk

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Rupesh

does sencha applications compatible for all browsers

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Delan

Here is the official help forum

http://groups.google.com/group/jqtouch/?pli=1

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mobilewebdeveloperbeginner

Hi!
THX for the great jqtouch!

I cannot find a forum for jqtouch to submit my questions / comments / ideas. Is there a forum I did not find?

THX!

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mobilewebdeveloper

I have found a quickest and cheapest way to learn developing web application for Smartphones using jQTouch : Try the book on Amazon that teaches how to develop Web Applications for Smartphones using PHP, MySQL and jQTouch.
The book name is "Beginning Web Development for Smartphones: Developing Web Applications with PHP, MSQL, and jQTouch".
The book is worth investment. Very easy to follow and is very cheap too

Here is the link:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0042X9CHI

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bij

Delan,

I'm the author of the Beer in Japan application and website.

Originally I used Phonegap with the goal of easy porting to Android. I soon found out that both Phonegap and Titanium had issues getting up and running with Android, so I ended up writing my own custom webview wrapper for Android. I've since written my own wrapper for Apple too. Phonegap and Titanium have great potential, but you end up fighting with bugs and lack of documentation - moving to my own wrapper made things much easier, ironically.

The idea of write once, run anywhere is definitely possible with HTML and JQuery/JQTouch. It's not quite as easy as people think though, as there are implementation differences and user expectation differences across platforms.

Not to hog your comments, I've written more about these topics in this post:

http://breakingart.com/blog/2010/06/15/the-top-five-things-i-learnt-as-an-apple-developer-moving-to-android-development/

Points #1 and #4 are the most relevant.

Thanks for linking to the BIJ application.

Cheers!

Alan - Beer in Japan / Breaking Art

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lakshan jayathilaka

jqtouch is an awesome product for mobile web developers. i have been using that since several months and very happy with performances.

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David Kaneda

Hi Delan, thanks for the great writeup! I just want to point out that jQTouch will remain jQTouch, while Sencha Touch is a new framework, with a different methodology and feature set. I'll be posting more details on the differences and similarities to my blog soon, but if you could consider editing the title a bit it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave

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