In the mobile industry, it has quite a few of frameworks available aiming to create a mobile web app rapidly. To help you start up your mobile development, I have done some research on all mobile frameworks, and below is the list. I have used jQTouch before, it’s pretty easy to implement but definitely has a lot of room of improvement.
Zepto.js Zepto.js is a minimalist JavaScript framework for mobile WebKit browsers, with a jQuery-compatible syntax. The goal: a 2-5k library that handles most basic drudge work with a nice API so you can concentrate on getting stuff done. Zepto.js is currently in early beta, and you can help to make it awesome by contributing code, documentation and demos.
Appcelerator
Use Appcelerator Titanium to build mobile apps for iPhone & Android and desktop apps for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux from Web technologies
DynamicX DHTMLX Touch is an HTML5-based JavaScript library for building mobile web applications. It’s not just a set of UI widgets, but a complete framework that allows you to create eye-catching, cross-platform web applications for mobile and touch-screen devices.
Sencha Sencha Touch, the first HTML5 mobile JavaScript framework that allows you to develop mobile web apps that look and feel native on iPhone and Android touchscreen devices, has just hit the big 1.0. And best of all, it’s completely free to use.
jQuery Mobile A unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design.
jQTouch A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.
Wink ToolKit Wink toolkit is a mobile JavaScript framework for building webapps on iPhone, iPad and Android
iUI
iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing advanced mobile webapps for iPhone and comparable/compatible devices.
xUI
A super micro tiny dom library for authoring html5 mobile web applications.
iWebkit
WebKit is a file package designed to help you create your own iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad compatible website or webapp.
iWebAPP.net WebApp.Net is a light weight, powerful javascript framework taking advantage of AJAX technology. It provides a full set of ready to use components to help you develop, quickly and easily, advanced mobile web applications.
NimbleKit
NimbleKit is the fastest way to create applications for iOS. You don’t need to know Objective-C or the iOS SDK. All you need is to know how to write an HTML page with Javascript code.
MotherApp
The Quick, easy way to publish on iPad and Android.
RhoMobile
Rhodes is the cross platform smart phone framework for mobile application development, which allows developers to write smart phone native apps. It follows the MVC pattern. They have also started hosting the code on cloud called RhoHub . Apps built using Rhodes framework :: Sugar CRM, Pivotal tracker’s Track R, Wikipedia.
Ansca Mobile’s Corona SDK
Ansca Mobile’s Corona SDK is a simple-to-use mobile app development platform for iOS and Android.
TapLynx
A powerful iPhone framework.Rapidly develop iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps without learning Cocoa.
MoSync SDK
MoSync makes it easy, fun and cost efficient to develop mobile application for all the major platforms. Using C++ and a set of powerful APIs, you can harness the full power of modern smartphone platforms while still supporting Java ME devices using a single codebase.
SproutCore
SproutCore is an open-source framework for building blazingly fast, innovative user experiences on the web.
DraginFire SDK
iPhone + iPad Development in Windows without a Mac or Objective – C. Bring your App idea to life in standard C/C++ and never leave your Windows platform.
Unity Mobile
Build and deliver the best. Whether you are making a mobile website or publishing a mobile application, UNITY’s integrated platform is simple enough for any user, regardless of technical skill.
PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript.
How PhoneGap Works
Build your app once with web-standards
Based on HTML5, PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript.
Wrap it with PhoneGap
Using the free open source framework or PhoneGap build you can get access to native APIs.
Deploy to multiple platforms!
PhoneGap uses standards-based web technologies to bridge web applications and mobile devices.
With PhoneGap you can,
Take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3
Use JavaScript to write your code
Access Native Features
Deploy your app to Multiple Platforms
Take advantage of PhoneGap Build
Add PhoneGap Plugins to your project
Use Tools from the community
Get help from the growing Community
Open Source and Free
PhoneGap is an open source implementation of open standards. That means developers and companies can use PhoneGap for mobile applications that are free, commercial, open source, or any combination of these. The PhoneGap project will always remain free and open source under an MIT license.
Good news for the Front-end developers under us! Now we can use third-party Framweworks like PhoneGap for iOS Application Development
Apple Computer Inc. said that it will back away from earlier restrictions it imposed on application developers in its iOS Developer Program, a move it said was prompted by feedback from its developer community for third-party development tools, potentially clearing a path for Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash on the iPhone and iPad devices.
Specifically, in gutting section 3.3.1 of its iOS Developer Program License Agreement and modifying sections 3.3.2 and 3.3.9, the vendor said it now will allow developers to use third-party development tools to create iOS applications for the iPhone and iPad as long as the resulting App Store software does not download code.
Earlier this year in its release of iOS 4.0, Apple banned third-party development tools and insisted on specific programming languages.
In addition, Apple said it has made available App Store Review Guidelines to make clear to developers the rules under which it reviews and accepts submitted applications.
“We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store,” Apple said in a statement.
Application developers for the iPhone and iPad have long complained about not understanding how Apple evaluates and approves applications.
Apple said it has set up an App Review Board should a developer seek redress if the vendor rejects its application.
Apple’s revamped rules also allow developers to include advertisements from third-party companies in their applications, a change that drew praise from Omar Hamoui, the former AdMob chief executive and current Google Inc. vice president of product management.
“Apple’s new terms will keep in-app advertising on the iPhone open to many different mobile ad competitors and enable advertising solutions that operate across a wide range of platforms,” Hamoui wrote in a blog post.
“This is great news for everyone in the mobile community, as we believe that a competitive environment is the best way to drive innovation and growth in mobile advertising,” Hamoui wrote.
According to Apple, the App Store is the world’s largest mobile application platform with more than 250,000 applications and 6.5 billion downloads. The company said that application developers have recorded in aggregate more than $1 billion in sales from the store.
The latest entry into the mobile-framework field is Sencha Touch, brought to you by the same people that created Ext JS, jQTouch and Raphael,
all of which have been combined under the name Sencha.
Sencha Touch, released this week, bills itself as “the first HTML5 framework for mobile devices,” which isn’t quite true. Several other mobile frameworks make use of HTML5 APIs like offline storage, or companion APIs like geolocation. But Sencha is nevertheless well worth a look if you’re thinking of building a cross-platform mobile app.
Sencha offers built-in support for the geolocation API and the offline storage API, and takes advantage of CSS 3 for smaller, image-less design elements. Because all the major mobile platforms — iOS, Android and WebOS — use similar WebKit-based browsers, there’s little to worry about when it comes to support for cutting edge features like HTML5 and CSS 3. Even when Firefox arrives on mobiles, you should expect support to be on par.
Sencha has some demos available if you’d like to see what’s possible. The GeoCongress demo makes use of the geolocation API to find out where you are and then show a list of your senators and representative. There’s also a very slick Solitaire demo that shows how to preserve an app’s state using the HTML5 local storage API.
The Sencha Touch code is available under a GPLv3 license. If you’d like to experiment with the code, head over to the new Sencha Touch site and grab a copy.
Today I want to share 10 iPad apps that are particularly geared towards web developers.
Because, with a product as aesthetically pleasing as the iPad, you just know it’s something that developers will be naturally drawn to- especially with apps like these to help us do better work.
Gusto was created to embrace the workflow of web development on the iPad. Quickly identify your project with a beautifully generated thumbnail of your website. Open your project and download multiple files and folders at a time from your FTP server. Gusto allows you to open multiple documents in tabs for faster navigation. After editing, preview your document locally to quickly see your updates. When it’s time to make your changes live, transfer your documents via the built-in FTP client or the easy to use document publishing. And now you’re editing… with Gusto.
What makes Pocket Monkey special is the custom renderer specifically built to keep text file whitespace formatting intact. Pinch zooming and line numbers allow you to navigate large text files quickly. Pocket Monkey even adds a tab key to keep both Code and Web monkeys happy.
EditPad is an iPad HTML editor to go. With focus on organization and ease of use, EditPad is the best solution for Web Developers, Designers and Hobbyists.
This application is design to easily be able to develop web pages mobile, and be able to upload to your ftp server while you are on the go. It comes with some great features. You can open up to 10 pages off your server or on the IPad locally and be able to navigate through them easily. You also have Page Previewing that enables you to see your web page layout quick and easily. Their is also a syntax bar to make the code writing go faster and smoother.
Whether you are a web designer or just curious – this application is for you. Source Viewer shows the HTML, CSS and Javascript source code of any website.
Tags, keywords and CSS attributes are highlighted with a different color.
It extracts the links which are embedded into HTML and CSS so that they can be followed easily.
It collects all images from the HTML and CSS which can be viewed separately in a list and full screen.
This browser show you the source code of web pages. Links remain active and you move from page to page without ever displaying anything else than source text. A small pop window show you real site content for quick discover some link. Source code is reading in the background
For webmaster, very useful in the construction phase of a site, you have instant access to various components of a site in text only mode, images are also displayed in full text!
This iPad version is really a great one, large screen make clean and easy to read code source.
