Unidev Tech Blog

Posts Tagged ‘CSS3’

It’s easy to say mobile development is continuing to grow every day with no signs of slowing down. Creating ways for users to access all the features a company has to offer are continuously sought after. With Sencha Touch and PhoneGap, it’s become much easier for developers to create powerful and intuitive applications, for users that can be deployed via the web as well as distributed on the iOS App store or Android Marketplace. The purpose of this blog post is to provide a brief, easy to understand explanation about what each technology does, and how they can work together to create a powerhouse of new elements.

Sencha Touch is a web framework that uses a combination of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript to create rich and formable web pages. The combination of these elements brings numerous capabilities that a standard web page cannot. Features include the familiar touch events tap, double tap, pinch, swipe and more. Through your choice of AJAX, JSONP, or YQL accessing sources and storing local data has created more possibilities for web apps. If a news site created a mobile app using Sencha Touch, a user could visit the page from their home internet access, have the articles of the day stored locally, and throughout the day could read their favorite articles without the need of a Wi-Fi network or phone provider’ internet service. One of the great things about Sencha Touch for developers is the code is written once and can be accessed on multiple platforms. Whether it’s a smartphone or tablet, Sencha touch is compatible with any device operating on iOS 3+, Android 2.1+, and Blackberry 6+. The entire library is less than 120kb, making it lightweight, and hardware concerns are less of an issue.

PhoneGap follows the same basic ideas as Sencha Touch. It uses technologies developers are already familiar with and makes them easily distributable to multiple platforms. Once your app is built with web-standards, encapsulate your code in PhoneGap. This allows access to a device’s native API. Depending on the device this could include accessing the camera, geo-location, notifications, and accelerometer, just to name a few. At this point the app has been built, wrapped in PhoneGap to use the fancy gadgets included on your device, and now acts as a native application. The next step available is to submit it to the iOS App Store, or the Android Market. This can significantly increase the number of potential users to the product or service provided.

By themselves Sencha Touch and PhoneGap are two powerful frameworks at a developer’s disposal. A great feature is they can be used hand-in-hand with one another. Where one may be lacking, the other makes up for. Sencha Touch is a fantastic tool for creating web apps but it doesn’t give you access to device functions like the camera and notifications. Because this tool runs as a browser and not as an application, it doesn’t allow you to submit what you’ve created to an applications marketplace. This is where PhoneGap comes into the picture. PhoneGap can be used to encapsulate a Sencha Touch Application allowing your Sencha app to gain access to your devices feature as well as allow your creation to be published to your desired app marketplaces.

Sencha Touch and PhoneGap are tools that have the potential to open the doors for new mobile possibilities that will meet and exceed client expectations.