Mobile web frameworks are something I've spent a lot of time working with and researching for several years, pretty much from their earliest days, so perhaps I can provide a bit of insight that may be helpful. Just to be clear, I am independent of all the key framework development companies and what follows are my own opinions based on my own R&D and experience.
I would class Sencha Touch (particularly the latest v2) as the current "Rolls Royce" of mobile web frameworks. Actually Sencha Touch was an offshoot of jQTouch - the original core developer of JQTouch was hired by Sencha and the ExtJS framework architecture was adapted to create Sencha Touch. I've not really been impressed by jQuery Mobile, but then I'm personally not a big fan of jQuery generally. The general view is that jQuery Mobile is focussed more on mobile web *sites*, while frameworks like Sencha Touch are all about emulating the Native App experience (both iOS and Android) via the capabilities of WebKit mobile browsers, HTML5 & CSS3. As other posters have noted, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with the Sencha licensing policy, though, unlike ExtJS, Sencha Touch has a free license even for commercial use (interestingly Sencha changed licensing of Sencha Touch to a free license when they announced v1.0 and at that time jQuery Mobile was beginning to make a buzz - most saw this as a defensive move by Sencha to stop people defecting) JQTouch is somewhat more rudimentary compared with Sencha Touch and is a bit of a back-water these days. It's much more CSS3 and tag orientated compared with Sencha Touch's pure Javascript approach. That makes it simpler to learn and use but it does tend to have limitations compared with Sencha Touch. Whilst Sencha Touch attempts (pretty impressively) to work across both iOS and Android platforms, JQTouch (certainly in the past) tended to focus on iOS Native App look and feel. n my opinion, the one to watch is Dojo Mobile which, whilst still in its relatively early days, seems to be doing a lot of good stuff in a very nice way. There are, of course, a growing number of other frameworks appearing, but I personally would stick with the big guys who have been in this sector for many more years and who understand the many nasty devils that lurk in the detail. As with all software, anyone can create 80% of what's needed in pretty quick time. It's that remaining 20% that kills them and frustrates the hell out of potential users. In summary, for now, my view is that Sencha Touch is the leader by a long way. Yes it has a steep learning curve. Their documentation is improving these days and they have done a great job of harmonising the ExtJS and Sencha Touch 2 API architecture, concepts and syntax. As commented elsewhere, I've done quite a bit of work on abstracting and automating the use of both Sencha Touch and ExtJS, but my work is currently focused on their integration with the GT.M and Cache databases - though I have plans to open that up in the future by virtue of the ewdGateway Node.js module. In the meantime, if you don't use (or want to uee) those databases, I'm afraid you'll have to climb that steep learning curve, but the reward is a very cool set of mobile web capabilities Rob On Apr 16, 2:28 pm, "john.tiger" <[email protected]> wrote: > we've tried using JQuery Mobile but it's way too buggy (and note all the > unanswered posts on the forum which is not a good sign) > > Sencha Touch seems popular but looks complex to use with a node > framework so looking at JQTouch (I guess it's some sort of off-shoot > from Sencha). We want to keep things as simple as possible. > > any experiences / suggestions ? -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
