Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

In November , mobile internet usage surpassed desktop internet usage for the first time, showing just how much smartphones have penetrated the internet user base. Moreover, mobile applications have made the lives of people exponentially more convenient, making tasks such as photo editing, online shopping, and guided navigation possible with just a few taps on the mobile screen. In alone, there were around There are a vast number of programming languages that may be used when creating different types of applications. Unsurprisingly, it has grown to be the most popular programming language in the world.

Thankfully, there are a number of technologies that make this possible. In this article, we take a look at Appcelerator, a platform for developers that enables them to do just that. Founded in , Appcelerator is a US-based mobile technology company that provides tools to enable developers to create cross-platform mobile applications using a single JavaScript code.

It began as a desktop, web, and rich internet application development startup, but in it began to shift its focus on mobile application development. Appcelerator offers a number of products in its technology suite. One of its main products is Appcelerator Titanium , a free, open-source framework that allows developers to create native and hybrid mobile, desktop, and web applications from a single codebase written in JavaScript. Appcelerator claims that using Titanium gives the same performance as applications written using native APIs, but Titanium mobile applications can be created much more quickly.

Appcelerator Alloy is another free, Apache-licensed framework built on top of Appcelerator Titanium that makes it easy to implement the model-view-controller architecture into a Titanium application. The platform comes at various price points , starting with a free version suitable for individual developers. By design, Appcelerator Titanium accelerates cross platform mobile app development because you are given the tools to write commonly used functionalities with just a few lines of code.

Being a cross-platform framework, Titanium enables you to write a single piece of code and use this code to deploy to different operating systems, requiring only minor tweaks to tailor the code to each platform. JavaScript is used by the vast majority of developers, and since Appcelerator Titanium uses JavaScript as its language, it eliminates the need to learn a new programming language.

Capabilities

Using JavaScript makes the framework immediately familiar to most developers, so Titanium mobile application development offers a shortened learning phase and subsequently, shortened development times. Being cross-platform, Titanium enables developers to write code for different operating systems from a single codebase, but these developers will have to test this code on each individual platform he wishes to support.

Although a Titanium mobile app may run smoothly from the Titanium IDE, some undetected errors may occur when executed on a specific platform, which can only be detected at runtime. Appcelerator Titanium is cross-compiled , which is closer in behavior to an interpreted language than a compiled one.

As such, it may come with increased startup and runtime costs.

Build great mobile experiences faster

These developers will become your core mobile app developers who will be responsible for creating your mobile apps from the ground up and deploy them to different operating systems such as Android, iOS, and even Windows. As such, it is imperative that you carefully select the Titanium developer or Appcelerator app designer you will hire. One possible qualification you may look for in an Appcelerator developer is an official Appcelerator Titanium certification.

Appcelerator offers two levels of certification for Titanium developers. The first level is the Titanium Certified Developer TCD certification, which requires developers to have a strong familiarity with JavaScript fundamentals and the basic concepts of Appcelerator Titanium.

The second level of certification is the Titanium Certified Expert TCE certification, which requires a developer to have a mastery of the Titanium framework down to its most advanced features. Titanium is a fully open source platform developed by a company called Appcelerator, which is now part of Axway. You can find the source code on GitHub.

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Studio will then proceed to install everything you need including the Android SDK. The Titanium SDK in turn is built with Objective C or Java in case of Android and that in turn will create the native components which you are initiating. It will behave like a native window, and will look like a native window.

Because it actually is. The underlying code was purely there for creating it. Keep in mind, the JavaScript will be compiled with the app, so the initial package of an app is bigger than you will have it natively.

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

This has no effect whatsoever on performance of the app. As you see, it is a grey window with nothing in it. The result is the expected navigation bar on top:. NavigationWindow is actually one of the few exceptions in cross-platform development with Titanium.

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We will slightly adjust the code, so we check whether the app is iOS or Android. You can do this easily by checking if the iOS namespace exists. The resulting code is this:. We can do this easily too! Just add the property title in the createWindow method:. So, developing cross-platform apps is really really simple, and incredibly useful for JavaScript developers.

You always have to keep the target platform in mind when developing apps! New tutorials in this series will appear soon. Until then, I recommend browsing the documentation of Titanium so you can see the huge list of APIs that are supported.