I'm about to start a new Titanium project. So far, what I've written is what's now considered as "Classic Project" (I've been writing Titanium apps since before Alloy).
I was wondering whether or not it's worth while to switch to Alloy for my new project. I know that basically, Alloy compiles to "Classic" Titanium code before compiling down to the java project or objective-c project. I also know about a big advantage in that "pre-compilation" process, which is to mark in alloy code that are relevant only for Android or iPhone and not including the other in the compiled "Classic" code.
My main concerns are flexibility - as with "Classic" I feel like I have more control over the code and what's going on.
Second concern, I have controls (like open sourced sliding menu) that are not written for alloy - how will I be able to have them as part of my project?
I started asking myself rather to use Alloy or not after finding (introduced in TiConf 2014) TI UX (https://github.com/jaraen/Ti.UX.Templates) which is written for Alloy.
few other questions:
how can I have old UI code run inside Alloy?
Can I have controls written for Alloy run in a "Classic" project?
Can "Classic" project also map out code not belonging to iOS/Android?
is there a difference in performance between Alloy projects and Classic projects? what about other flexibility issues?
Thanks
Just in case someone sees this question and needs an answer:
I have also posted this question in the Appcelerator Q&A where I got some answers here: http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/177739/appcelerator-titanium---alloy-vs-classic
The answer I was given is partial, and more info could be found in a questions asked here: http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/177542/classic-vs-alloy
I felt that the switch to Titanium Alloy from classic was right for me. I felt that classic Titanium development wasn't structured enough nor provided me with enough guidance on a good way to structure my app. Alloy provides a MVC structure to your code, but classic didn't completely prevent you from rolling your own or using one of the community libraries with MVC capabilities. In this respect I guess I would say it is more flexible to use classic over Alloy, because you can choose how to accomplish your structure, rather than fitting into Titanium Alloy's structure. That being said, I've never felt limited by Alloy.
How you develop in Titanium is your preference. There is no right answer to using Alloy or using classic. If one works better for you, use it. I feel that the structured approach to Alloy's separation of display and business logic provides me a structure that makes sense to me when developing an app.
I have not found that Alloy is less flexible than classic. Since you can use classic code in your Alloy project, you can pretty much do everything in Alloy that you can in classic. I'm sure that are some edge cases, that I haven't run into, where one might be easier than another when coding a specific type of application. It may be that classic is less flexible because I don't think you can use Alloy in your classic app. I don't believe the compiler would know how to build that.
Whenever I assess if I'm going to use a particular technology, I make a series of experimental mini programs to make sure all the capabilities are present for my application's requirements. If I feel that it doesn't fit or it is too difficult to reach those requirements, I don't use that technology. For example, when I switched to Alloy, I made sure the Ti.Paint library would still work. If it didn't I would still be using classic.
Just like classic, there are controls for Alloy. There is a pretty slick Alloy-based sliding menu module out there already. I use the Ti.Paint library, which existed before Alloy and isn't an Alloy specific module.
http://gitt.io/ is a decent starting point for finding Alloy modules/widgets.
index.xml
<Alloy>
<Window id="win">
<View id="content" />
</Window>
</Alloy>
1) In your index.js file, you would have the following to use classic coding to manipulate an Alloy view.
index.js
var myview = Ti.UI.createView({
backgroundColor: 'green'
});
$.content.add(myview);
2) I don't think you can use Alloy code in your classic project. As you mentioned before, it needs to do translation on the code and a classic project would likely skip that step in the process.
3) Are you asking if you can include or remove parts of the code based on if it is Android or IOS specific? You could probably do this with include/require statements strategically placed between if (Ti.Platform.osname == "android") statements to require in or not the code you want. If the code is for Android, require this one, if it is for IOS, require in that one.
4) Never attempted to check the performance between classic and Alloy-based projects. I think, since I switched and never noticed an issue that bothers me or my customers, I never put much thought into it. It is entirely possible that Alloy auto-generates code that is in some cases slower. I've never noticed it.
I feel that the efficiency I gain in using Alloy far outweigh that as an immediate concern. Plus, if I felt that I didn't like the way a particular control was created through Alloy, I could use the classic code and define that control myself having all the control of a definition from a classic project.
Related
I've started playing around with Appcelerator Hyperloop. While it seems great to access native APIs from JS from day zero, it does raise a few questions about architecture of the platform and the performance.
Currently (AFAIK) a Titanium app has a main UI thread (that runs the native UI controllers) and a JS thread (that runs the JS logic). Each call from JS to Native is passed though the "Bridge" (which is the expansive operation in an app).
Also, Titanium API doesn't cover all the native API and abstracts as much as it can. But if new APIs are introduced it could take time for Appcelerator to implement those into the platform.
One of my favorite things about Titanium is the ability to extend it (using objective-c for iOS and java for Android) - allowing to use native APIs that are not covered by Titanium, and also developing a really native performance controls in case we need to do anything that's too "heavy" for JS. And, as mentioned it's developed 100% native for each platform.
Now that Appcelerator introduced Hyperloop I've done a simple test app and saw that Hyperloop is not translated into native code but just to normal JS code:
var UILabel = require('hyperloop/uikit/uilabel');
var label = new UILabel();
label.text = "HELLO WORLD!";
$.index.add(label);
And another thing about it is that you have to run on the main thread.
So we basically have a few things come to mind here as far as Hyperloop architecture goes:
We still have a bridge? if Hyperloop is JS that calls "special" Hyperloop require then we still have a bridge, that now not only acts as a bridge but also needs to do some sort of reflection (which is also an expansive operation)?
Until now JS ran in it's own thread - so now running in a single main thread seems to be a potential source to more UI blocking operation.
The old-fashioned modules were truly native (not including the bridge call) - so how do Hyperloop-enabled apps compare with those?
There isn't much documentation or articles about Hyperloop that explain the inner working yet - so if anyone has any answers have been trying apps with it could be very helpful.
Answering your questions straight-forward:
There are no Kroll-Proxies involved anymore, since actual classes are being generated on runtime. This is done by using the hyperloop-metabase that does reflection (as you already said) to build an AST that grabs the actual signatures, types, classes, methods, properties, etc.
We did not see any performance-issues with running on the main-thread for now. If you do so, please file a JIRA-ticket so we can investigate the use-case.
The old-modules were "less native" then now, simply because they were all wrapped by the Kroll-proxy (by extending every view from TiUIView and every proxy from TiProxy / TiViewProxy. Hyperloop does not work with those, making the module-development much more faster by also allowing the developer to test his/her process live in their app without the need of packaging and referencing the module manually. Hyperloop modules are nothing else then CommonJS modules that are already used frequently across Alloy and other Ti-components.
I hope that gives you a quick overview on how Hyperloop works. If you have further questions, let us know!
Hans
(As a detailed answer to the above comment)
So let's say you have a tableview in iOS. The native class is UITableView and the Titanium-API is Ti.UI.TableView / Ti.UI.ListView.
While the ListView already provides a huge performance-boost compared to the TableView by abstracting the Child-API usage to templates, those child-API's (Ti.UI.Label, Ti.UI.ImageView, ...) are still custom classes that are wrapped and provide custom logic (!) e.g. keeping track of it's parent-references, internal data-structures and locks to jump between the threads.
If you now check the Hyperloop example of a native UITableView, you access the native API's directly, so no proxy behind it needs to manage sections, templates, items etc. Of course we deliver that API through a kroll proxy in order to display it in Titanium, but you don't "jump between the bridge" with every call you make from the SDK.
The easiest way to see that is to actually run some bigger example like the tableview, collectionview and view-animation. If you do a fast scroll through these, you already feel the performance boost compared to "classic" Titanium API's, simply because the only communication between your proxy and (like a Ti.UI.Window you want to add it to) is the .add() to receive the native API of the type HyperloopClass.
Finally, of course it still makes sense to use Ti.UI.ListView for example, because it comes with the builtin utilities that Titanium devs love (events, easy configuration and layout-handling). But thats also where the benefit of Hyperloop comes along, by allowing the developer to access those API's him-/herself.
I hope that helps a bit more to understand it.
I am working on enterprise-level business applications, and now is the time to start thinking about the non-desktop experience.
We have a common component code-base that is using dojo, and are trying to get as much code re-use as possible.
I am really struggling to determine if I should re-use the same code base, or have separate code bases for desktop and mobile.
A big factor in my decision making is the viabliity of dojox/mobile.
It seems pretty cool, and uses the dojo infrastructure which is a huge win, but the fact that it is in dojox scares me a little.
Some questions:
Is dojox/mobile something that can be relied on long term?
Is it a smart idea to try to swap out dijit components for dojox/mobile components depending on what has.js can tell me?
Will dojox/mobile be a part of dojo2.0?
I would add that in Dojo 2.0 the plan is to converge as much as possible the desktop (dijit) and the mobile (dojox/mobile) widgets which should help in your use-case. See: http://mail.dojotoolkit.org/pipermail/dojo-contributors/2013-June/029041.html
You can rely on dojox/mobile. DojoX will indeed disappear from the Dojo Toolkit in 2.0, but most matured (and probably maintained) modules will be pushed to the dijit/dojo library. I quote the reference guide:
In the future (Dojo 2.0), the DojoX package and namespace will
removed. Sub-Packages and modules will be either integrated into the
Dojo Core, Dijit or separated as their own stand-alone package. For
the 1.X code stream though, in order to ensure backwards
compatibility, all these packages are contained within the dojox
namespace and package.
If we look at the explanation of Mature, we can read the following:
This package or module is considered mature and is being actively
developed and maintained by committers within the Dojo Toolkit. It is
expected that it will persist into the foreseeable future.
Source
And if you look at the link above, you will notice that dojox/mobile is categorized as mature.
Another reason you can rely on it is that IBM (which can be considered a pretty big company and committer to the Dojo toolkit) also relies on dojox/mobile for their mobile product called IBM Worklight. If they rely on it, then there's no reason you couldn't.
I don't think it will be easy to start from the same code base and swap out dijits for dojox/mobile components. Usually mobile app development requires an entire different strategy than web applications. You will probably have to split certain things into multiple views and some dijits may not have a mobile alternative.
You can probably re-use most of your utilities and business logic, but I think you will have to start from scratch again if you want to write your view(s). But I'm not really an advanced mobile developer.
So GWT best practices encourages one to use some flavour of MVP, which should in theory allow one to write different native views while sharing the presenter business logic.
This seems to be at the heart of the GWT spin off Google project http://code.google.com/p/j2objc/ which converts the non-UI part of your code to Objective-C, allowing you to write the rest natively in Objective-C.
So my question is: If this really hard part of the puzzle is being solved, how hard would it be to include an HTML5 mobile library (like MGWT or Touch4j [Sencha]) into this MVP pipeline to have the best of all worlds?
Having dabbled with http://code.google.com/p/playn/ , this clearly seems to be the blue-print for having a cross-plaftform build system (native android & html5 & java &...), but that project is geared for single screen drawing and event loop for game dynamics and doesn't allow for keyboard input and other typical mobile goodies.
It seems a shame that if so much of the problem has been solved, that it's not possible to go the extra mile. The answer to this question would be the best plan for actioning a solution, including such nigglies as which MVP structure to choose that would ease accommodation of the various widget libraries (GWTP vs MVP 2.1), and if the best approach is to start with the PlayN code base, and start to hack it.. what are the gotchas? Or if another path is chosen, why that one? and why would it be the best??
Thanx a lot. :-)
It is not clear whether your question is - evaluation options for multi-platform app development or mvp.
You can evaluate additional technology which are used with Sencha and GWT
1) mgwt
2) titanium
3) phonegap
You can also reference - Creating a mobile app using Google App Engine and GWT?
Note: PlayN as you mention is more of gaming platform and not suitable for business app.
MVP is definitely doable... and at times you may feel like its a lot of work, but it pays off in the end. Check out the Touch4j Kitchen Sink, which is written using MVP. You can take that down to the device with Cordova if you wish. The code is on GitHub:
https://github.com/emitrom/touch4jks
The repo is actively being worked on (we are updating ourselves to Touch4j 4.0) so it won't run out the gate, but at least you can see and follow the model :-)
Titanium4j is to Appcelerator's Titanium as Touch4j is to Sencha Touch. You may want to check that out as well. Titanium4j and Touch4j rely on GWT.
Cheers.
I'm developing a phonegap app for iOS, an would like to insert a new option in the context menu that shows up after selecting text. I had a look to several post which are quite related, and almost all of them led to this link. I followed the instructions of that example, but couldn't make it work, due to my lack of experience with Objective-c. Even so, I'm not sure if that one is a valid solution using Cordova/Phonegap, at least without hacking the framework.
Has somebody accomplished this task?
I am looking to make a Mac version of one of my iPhone apps and was looking for a good ay to hit the ground running. I know how to code in Objective-c and Cocoa, and I know how to piece something together from scratch if I have to, but I am looking for an easier way.
Are there any open-source templates for coding Mac desktop applications that I might be able to pick up and use to get started off without reinventing the wheel?
EDIT:
I guess what I am looking for is an easy way to get started on an app that has the "iTunes Look and Feel". If there are some bare-bones version of this layout as some sort of template project, that would be great. Also, why has somebody down-voted this question? Have I asked something that is not appropriate for SO?
Apple includes lots of project templates with Xcode (vanilla application, document-based application, Core Data document-based application, etc.). I don't really know how much more you would want in a template. They're generally pretty good for getting you started, I think. If you're looking for something more than these offer out of a "template," maybe you could elaborate.
If you're just looking for a starting point for the interface, then check out BW Toolkit:
http://brandonwalkin.com/bwtoolkit/
He has some nice videos on his site showing how to create a Mail-like interface very quickly.
Besides the project templates included with Xcode, you should browse the application exmples in /Developer/Examples. Most of these examples are "full" applications that demonstrate one or more Cocoa-related concepts. Many could serve as the starting point for a similarly orriented app of your own.