Wednesday, December 23, 2009

cross platform web runtimes

I must admit, it was fun learning a bit of AS, but one thing that always bugged me about AIR-it is basically closed, and boy getting a eclipse setup without buying the IDE from adobe (eclipse already set up with their own plug-ins) was, lets just say a challenge and made the AS seem like pun intended:

  • WYSIWYG editing of the MXML(OK),
  • Action-script with code completion(semi OK, missing look-ups of external libraries for code completion)
Things to like about AIR is the encryption, signing and remote update of apps are well though out.

While I was looking at getting another project going in AIR after a work induced hiatus, I found some information about Titanium. Basically whats nice is:
  • Mostly JS based, with support for PHP/Python.
  • A good (Apache style) license I can probably trust.
A very good intro between Titanium and AIR was one not specifically aimed at exploring that angle, rather explaining the advantages of web run-times in general in for desktop apps on: "air-titanium-and-webos-10-things-you-cant-do-in-a-browser".

Now I'm intrigued and wanna see how easy porting from AIR to Titanium will be for my simple app... Will be reporting back soon (unless work kidnaps me again a few weeks!!!)

Edit:
Just tried to run one of the sample apps and here's my 2c:
  • (very) few sample apps: Tweetanium,
  • a 2.3Mb download! for a Twitter webapp??
  • On Kubuntu remember to set the http_proxy environmental variable before running the "installer" (Air detects it from KDE/desktop settings automatically!) then
  • It proceeded to download (more than the 2.3Mb!?) - this seemed like the support libraries for titanium, networking, disk access etc. After getting that sorted,
  • It would not run in any way. Or be killed except to kill -9 the process.
  • There is no encrypted package, all the JS of the app is clearly visible/editable before install - security seems lacking although I don't know if its only for some of these example apps, but then why are they on the "featured" list?
Conclusion:
From my quick dive into titanium it seems people like the tech it provides a lot more than it is ready for production use (compared with what I've experienced with AIR). sorry.