Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective • Hacker News Board

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#11

Post by tannerburson » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 4:51 PM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #9

I don't disagree with him but I still think Appcelerator is worth it. Because as annoying as Appcelerator can be it's still quicker than writing your app twice and Apple's devotion to objective-C makes it very hard to carry over code from other platforms. I would give two warnings though (which are supported by the author's piece)... 1. You need to make sure your use case is covered in the Kitchen Sink example. If yo…

I haven't bought support, so I can only speculate based on their community forum, and public bug tracker. With that out of the way, unless paid support gets custom code deployed to them fixing core platform problems, I don't see it as being a solution.

In it's current state I couldn't recommend Titanium to anyone. I hope it continues to improve, and get better, as both the idea and implementation have a ton of positives, it's just almost unusable right now for anything big enough to really see the benefits in the multi-platform support.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#12

Post by andymoe » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 4:56 PM UTC

We used it to make a simple android app in the last month. It worked and I sure liked writing the app in JavaScript vs Java but we ran into huge issues with Titanium caching resources during the build process that were supposed have be removed or updated and leaving things behind that we then had to track down and manually remove. It basically just takes whatever is in the build directory and tries to package it with little validation for correctness. My suggestion to people using it is to sanity check the code it generates in eclipse or xcode as part of your dev process.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#13

Post by TomOfTTB » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 4:58 PM UTC

tannerburson wrote: post #11

TomOfTTB wrote: post #9

I don't disagree with him but I still think Appcelerator is worth it. Because as annoying as Appcelerator can be it's still quicker than writing your app twice and Apple's devotion to objective-C makes it very hard to carry over code from other platforms. I would give two warnings though (which are supported by the author's piece)... 1. You need to make sure your use case is covered in the Kitchen Sink example. If yo…

I haven't bought support, so I can only speculate based on their community forum, and public bug tracker. With that out of the way, unless paid support gets custom code deployed to them fixing core platform problems, I don't see it as being a solution. In it's current state I couldn't recommend Titanium to anyone. I hope it continues to improve, and get better, as both the idea and implementation have a ton of positi…

I'd be interested to know what you consider the core platform problems because I've never run into anything that couldn't be worked around.

Don't get me wrong. I sympathize. I lost several nights of sleep because I was so angry after a day of using Appcelerator that I literally couldn't calm myself down enough. There were days when I'd decided to not only stop using Appcelerator but to make it my life mission to tell other people to stay away from it.

But those days passed and eventually support (and a lot of manual error checking) got me through.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#14

Post by sschwarzhoff » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 4:58 PM UTC

Thanks for your feedback. Certainly lots of issues that we can and do plan to address. On the tools side, as several people have mentioned below, we are releasing a new IDE this week called Titanium Studio. This release will address two critical areas that you identified in your post: debugging and overall tooling stability. The IDE itself is based on Aptana Studio, which has several years of solid development behind it. Sample projects, code completion, and other frequently-asked features will be included. Titanium Studio ships this week.

Certainly there are other areas in your post where we can improve. Know that we are making investments in all of the areas you describe and we certainly appreciate everyone's support as we grow the platform, the community, and the supporting infrastructure behind it.

Thanks again for your feedback

Best Regards,

Scott Schwarzhoff VP, Developer Relations

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#15

Post by viralinfection » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 5:04 PM UTC

sschwarzhoff wrote: post #14

Thanks for your feedback. Certainly lots of issues that we can and do plan to address. On the tools side, as several people have mentioned below, we are releasing a new IDE this week called Titanium Studio. This release will address two critical areas that you identified in your post: debugging and overall tooling stability. The IDE itself is based on Aptana Studio, which has several years of solid development behind…

Will the Studio have support for nibs/interface builder? If not when do you think we can see this type of feature, if at all?

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#16

Post by tjarratt » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 5:07 PM UTC

jarin wrote: post #8

Yeah, it's too bad. I know a guy on the development team, and I think they're doing a great job given the complexity of the task they've taken on, but I can't recommend it for anything other than prototypes or very simple applications.

Based on what little I've seen, this sounds accurate. Both Android and iOS have a large amount of features and controls that developers are used to having access to - distilling that down into a simple codebase can't be easy.

It will be interesting to see if any early adopters continue to support Appcelerator; I'd love to see what their product looks like in a year or two. At the moment, my work is a little too complicated and urgent to want to rewrite anything for an immature codebase.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#17

Post by jeff18 » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 5:10 PM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #13

tannerburson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't bought support, so I can only speculate based on their community forum, and public bug tracker. With that out of the way, unless paid support gets custom code deployed to them fixing core platform problems, I don't see it as being a solution. In it's current state I couldn't recommend Titanium to anyone. I hope it continues to improve, and get better, as both the idea and implementation have a ton of positi…

I'd be interested to know what you consider the core platform problems because I've never run into anything that couldn't be worked around. Don't get me wrong. I sympathize. I lost several nights of sleep because I was so angry after a day of using Appcelerator that I literally couldn't calm myself down enough. There were days when I'd decided to not only stop using Appcelerator but to make it my life mission to tell…

Here's two "show stoppers" that made me stop experimenting with Titanium.

1) If you have a custom UI, dragging the window around is painfully slow and erratic. Resizing the window is actually so slow it's unusable.

2) The built-in zip function doesn't seem to work with files over ~200 MB on Mac OS X.

I tried reaching Titanium, failed, and moved on.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#18

Post by skue » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #9

I don't disagree with him but I still think Appcelerator is worth it. Because as annoying as Appcelerator can be it's still quicker than writing your app twice and Apple's devotion to objective-C makes it very hard to carry over code from other platforms. I would give two warnings though (which are supported by the author's piece)... 1. You need to make sure your use case is covered in the Kitchen Sink example. If yo…

Aptana makes Java based SDKs and Eclipse plugins. I don't understand how having a slow, bloated code editor as your recommended development environment is going to fix anything.

Sure you may get better debugging tools, but that doesn't change the fact that their API is still incomplete, buggy, poorly documented, and lacking support.

Appcelerator's problem is focus. Instead of making their API rock solid on core platforms and building from there, they shipped it half finished while they chase after the next shiny thing (Blackberry support! Card readers! Our own code editor!)

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#19

Post by erik_p » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 5:16 PM UTC

I'm looking forward to the inevitable follow up post on the author's experience with Phone Gap... Has anyone used Phone Gap before and wants to share their thoughts?

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#20

Post by s00pcan » Mon, Apr 04, 2011, 5:17 PM UTC

"It’s only syntax/static checking is done via JSLint with a pretty arcane set of rules. Want to write one line if statements? That’s a warning. A for loop without checking for property existence? That’s a warning."

Someone hasn't read Javascript: The Good Parts.