Sencha Touch vs. jQtouch vs. GWT mobile vs. XUI vs. jQuery Mobile vs. [closed]

Question

Hey, there are some posts out there discussing mainly Sencha Touch and jQtouch.

I understand that Sencha is more for heavy apps. Read here: http://9-bits.com/post/723711597/jqtouch-and-sencha-touch

But what about GWT mobile vs. XUI vs. jQuery Mobile? Anyone tested them? GWT mobile looks quite nice... But I did not dig deeper yet. Any other good mobile dev frameworks?

Answer 1

If you want cross platform, web based, mobile support for devices beyond only webkit browsers (iOS, Android, BB 6.0+), you need a scalpel, not a chainsaw. Sencha, jQuery Mobile, and the like are great and give you tons of functionality right out of the box, but as many mentioned, they are mostly catering to the big mobile players and will likely leave you wanting when it comes to supporting and lower end devices.

My choice of scalpel has been phonegap + xuijs and I'm loving it so far. While it is a bare bones JS library, it gives you the foundation to build a reliable, gracefully degradable experience across the entire spectrum of smart phones (with wp7 on the way). Write your transitions, skinning, etc... as CSS and browsers that don't support them will simply deliver the content without the flare of sliding views, round corners, gradients, shadows, etc...

Answer 2

Here is an interesting thread discussing pros and cons of jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch:

http://www.quora.com/Were-deciding-between-jQuery-Mobile-currently-in-alpha-and-Sencha-Touch-What-are-the-pros-and-cons-for-each

... and here a blogpost covering more mobile cross-plattform solutions: http://interfacethis.com/2011/adventures-in-html5-part-one/

Answer 3

Unless you have no clue about html&css - gwt (mobile) is a bad choice. GWT makes a abstraction of the javascript in java which has some advantages but also brings big disadvantages. For example you can't use javascript language functions that are not available in java like closures. The Developer mode gets very slow on bigger projects. And you have need the complier for every new Browserversion. etc. My favorite is jquerymobile. Sencha could be an alternative but does not feel so native to HTML (IMHO)

Oh but If you have no clue about html&css. Or a big Team with Native-Ui-Java-Developers that has no exp with html&css. GWT could be a good choice. So it depends on you/your teams skill.

Answer 4

I'm not super-familiar with javascript, so I really like Uranium. It's a pre-built set of widgets and all you need to do is include some attributes in your HTML. But it also comes with XUI, so if you need that it's there too. I find JQuery far too bloated... I want my mobile sites to be super-fast, so I want minimum excess.