an introduction to the titanium appcelerator architecture. (cross platform programming seminar at university of pisa, july 2012)

1. Titanium Kickstart
Alessio Ricco
@alessioricco
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2. About Appcelerator
• Open Source Software Company
• Developing Titanium since 2008
• Offices in Mountain View, San Francisco,
Beijing, Tokio
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3. About Titanium
• Open source Framework
• Build native mobile or desktop applications
• Use open web technologies: Javascript, HTML, CSS
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4. About Titanium Mobile
• Cross Platform mobile development solution
• Support for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry
• Aptana Studio based IDE (Titanium Studio)
• Titanium API, Javascript Syntax
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5. Cross Platform Challenge
Write Once, Run Everywhere
• Non visual code reuse
• Visual code reuse
• Get the best from each platform
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6. Ti Cross Platform
Write Once, Adapt Everywhere
• Visual and not visual code reuse
• One language, One SDK
• Ability to manage platform specifics
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7. Cross Platform Approaches
• Platform Identity
• Brand Identity
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8. Platform Identity
• Immediately familiar to platform users
• Well known interaction models
• the app “looks like” it belongs to the platform
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9. Platform Identity
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10. Platform Identity Approach
• design and interaction models are different for
each platform
• UI components could be reused
• UI conventions and components
• Non-UI code reuse
• Delegation (UI controls are platform specific)
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11. Brand Identity
• Evocative
• New user experience
• Non-standard User Interface
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12. Brand Identity
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13. Brand Identity Approach
• identical UI across the platforms
• new UI must be learned
• UI conventions and components
• Non-UI code reuse, UI code reuse
• No Delegation
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14. The Best approach
• Depends on your needs
• emotional connection ?
• speed? interaction? utility?
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15. Build Native
• Choose one platform
• What if you choose the wrong platform ?
• How many languages you need to learn ?
• How many codebase you will support?
• How long will it take to build native on N platforms ?
• Who will write your code?
• Who will manage the versioning for each platform ?
• How much effort will be duplicated ?
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16. HTML ?
• Mobile Browsers are progressing fast
• Mobile Browsers are converging around WebKit
• HTML/CSS/Javascript are standard
• Cross Platform
• It’s easy to find a developer with some experience in these tools
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17. Native ?
• Native apps are more capable (db, camera, accellerometer, etc) and faster
• Native apps are smoother on resource constrained devices
• Are “always ON”
• Are able to work offline
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18. Titanium Appcelerator
• Single codebase to multiple platforms
• Platform specific “look and feel”
• Open Source and extensible (via Modules)
• Javascript: you can reuse your skills
• Quick development
• Integrated IDE
• Increasing speed
• Native code (You need the specific platform SDK)
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19. Titanium Architecture
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20. Mobile Architecture
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21. Platform Features
• Native UI components
• Location API
• SQLite
• Value persistence API
• XHR
• Facebook, Twitter,YQL
• audio video streaming, media recording
• CommonJS, Native code modules
• Analytics
• Cloud services
• Integrated IDE
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22. Typical App
Windows vs Views
Windows are like pages and
Views are like DIVs
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23. Typical App: Code
% code
UI
60
construction
event
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handling
business
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logic
UI Widgets are constructed
via JavaScript code
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24. Titanium Mobile App
• Is a Javascript program interpreted at
runtime on the device
• App.js is the main file who defines the App
root execution context
• The javascript engine are WebKit KJS
(iOS), Rhino (Android/BB),V8 (Android)
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25. Resources: web
• Learning Titanium
• http://www.slideshare.net/alessioricco
• http://docs.appcelerator.com/titanium/2.0/index.html#!/guide
• http://titaniumninja.com/
• http://www.slideshare.net/kwhinnery (thank you)
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26. Resources: twitter
@appcelerator, @jhaynie, @donthorp,
@marshall_law, @billdawson, @fusion94,
@alessioricco, @kevinwhinnery, @chadauld,
@clinttredway, @tyrusaurus
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