Turning Sencha Touch-based app into a true native iPhone app?

Question

As I understand, Sencha Touch is just a javascript library that lets you create websites that respond to multitouch and other features you find in native iPhone apps. So... Your end result is accessed on Safari on the iPhone, and not as a native iPhone app. Is there a way to convert this to a native app?

Answer 1

Yes, you can convert a Sencha Touch app to native. You have to use PhoneGap, or Nimblekit to do so. You can also write your own native wrappers - it's not very hard on iPhone, but more of a challenge on Android. We don't have a tutorial on this yet, but the phonegap guys have done this with at least one sencha app that they built. [I work for sencha]

Update: Here is a crazily detailed tutorial on using PhoneGap with Sencha

Answer 2

In principle yes. You could write some kind of a wrapper application. This application would have an ‘UIWebView‘ as the main view which is then used to browse the web. This would allow you to keep your HTML5-based app and wrap it in a native objective-c app.

If you want to write a "real" native app your would have to switch languages from HTML5, CSS and JS to Objective-C, which is really different.

Answer 3

So here is a question for the Sencha guys here, is there other documentation for Sencha Touch available beyond the API reference and sample apps on your site?

We are currently trying to switch a prototype application from JQTouch to Sencha, but are finding it challenging to get going with Sencha Touch; while there is a lot of documentation it doesn't seem to be the right documentation.

A really simple solution would be to make the API reference online allow comments so as we and others figure out how to use Sencha touch we could provide comments (look at php.net's manual to see how this worked for them.)