iWebkit vs. JQTouch vs. iUI

Question

I am going to develop a content rich application that ideally should have been an iPhone-app, but since I'm short on time, I will stick with technologies that I can, such as JQuery, CSS and HTML. The more mobile devices my site runs on besides iPhone, the better.

A brief search on the web leaves me with the impression that there are three tools I may use: iWebkit, JQTouch and iUI. I have toyed about with JQTouch, which I find impressive and simple to use.

With simplicity comes lack of customizability; I would very much like to have sliders and other cool features in my GUI.

Any comments on which of these three to go for?

Answer 1

I've talked about this subject a couple of days ago in a WebTuesday meeting, here are the slides of the presentation:

http://www.slideshare.net/akosma/webtuesday-mobile-web-applications-framework-overview

I talk about the following frameworks / technologies:

• iUI
• jQTouch
• WebApp.net
• iWebKit
• SproutCore / Cappuccino
• Yahoo! Blueprint

I personally have used iUI, and then later jQTouch, which I literally fell in love with.

Answer 2

I actually just finished writing and article comparing iUI and jQTouch. In my opinion, go with jQTouch because it covers a greater selection of WebKit browser phones like the Palm Pre, Droid and Nexus One.

It will be a slightly larger in file size because it includes the core jQuery library. But if you are already using jQuery in your site, that shouldn't matter.

You check out my article here: http://www.heinencreative.com/archives/articles/iui-vs-jqtouch/

Answer 3

I have done a short list of frameworks for this type of development see here and am working on an article comparing but the holiday and work intervened.

Personally i have done a site in iUI which was a conversion from a Mac Widget, so reused a lot of code. It was relatively easy to do, the code is solid (for iUI) and there is a site where there is support.

JQTouch looks good and so does iWebkit. Quickconnect is well supported and has a book associated with it (which by now should be wildly out of date) and Quickconnect claims to be useable for other mobile platforms as well.

Only hasving lloked i would probably go for JQTouch next time around as it will have mainstream support just with it being based on JQuery.