Appcelerator Titanium performance [closed]

Question

Last I used Appcelerators platform back in 2010, I saw very poor performance even for generating a simple table. Has anyone had an opportunity to try it out in the last few month? How is the overall speed of apps developed with this platform?

Answer 1

We're developing both iOS and Android using Titanium.

iOS

iOS apps are really fast. You won't notice that Titanium is used unless you need to provide concurrency. If you want to add rows to a table view by Pull-To-Refresh or while scrolling this will be slow because you can't manage when to use UI-Thread and when not. This is handled by Titanium. Nevertheless our application uses this features and we - and our (business) customers - are happy with that.

Android

Android could be much slower. This depends on your device and what you're going to implement. For instance again a table view with many different (in structure) rows can be very slow while a table view with thousands of similar rows is loaded fast and can be scrolled fast (see class attribute for table view rows, it's for caching). On newer devices (originally shipped with Android 4.x) the performance is as well as native development (except some special cases like on iOS). Older devices are much slower. Really slow on Android is filling a table view using data from a HTTPRequest. We have not figured out yet why this is so slow but - depending on device and network - loading 10 messages and fill the table view sometimes needs up to 5 seconds even with best network conditions. But this is the only real performance issue we noticed till today.

For both: Finally it depends on the use case you wanna implement. To see what is possible you should install the KitchenSink Apps (available at iTunes and Play Store for both systems) and try. Their you'll also see performance. But be careful - of course these demo apps are optimized to convince you of using titanium. But they're open source so you could have a look and see how they have done this.