Thursday April 14, 2011

Appcelerator Titanium: A world of hurt

I found this gem of a post about the headaches of using Appcelerator Titanium:

Middleware platforms are a great idea, in theory. In practice it means working through a vendor who is struggling to keep up with the underlying platforms, stuggling to support their paid customers (speculating here), and completely failing to support their free user base.

I get asked a lot about ways to do native development on iOS without Objective-C. Appcelerator Titanium is often mentioned. I’ve messed with it a bit and even brought in to “fix” a project that was built in it. The idea is nice—here’s an IDE that hopes to provide seamless cross platform development using Javascript. It’s a nightmare.

Avoid this huge layer of poorly supported and opaque abstraction. When asked about options to avoid Objective-C, I say use PhoneGap and roll your own Javascript components instead.