Here at OmniSpear, the development team is about to ramp up on creating a mobile application for the iOS and Android platform (Windows Phone support to follow). Evaluating the many frameworks out in the wild, we’ve become attracted to one specific contender. Our initial requirements out of the gate are as follows:
- Rapid development & deployment without steep learning curve.
- The ability to test the application on multiple physical devices without publishing the application to the market store (Google Play & Apple Store).
- Mobile application should have a native look and feel aspect to it.
Following options were assessed:
PhoneGap Build, Steroids, and Icenium all support the PhoneGap framework (or the open source version Cordova). Since Javascript is a common knowledge among our team, utilizing PhoneGap fits quite well in our development environment. All three has a solid build system allowing us to make changes and viewing the application on our own physical device with ease. However Icenium really shines when it comes to providing a rich user interface library, that’s where Kendo UI comes in (among other attractive integration features like MVVM).
Build, test, fix, test, and deploy. We could take the route of either creating or bringing in external open source work to create the bells and whistles and the lean underlying code that does the real work. However if the project schedule is too sensitive to bringing in some “cool” library from Github what naturally makes sense? In our case, a whole solution provider to keep development cycle tight and all integrated along with a dedicated customer support.
For those interested in the difference between the popular jQuery Mobile and Kendo UI: JQUERY MOBILE VS KENDO UI
