London Android Group

After attending the London Web Performance Testing Group on Wednesday evening, I went along to the London Android Group (londroid) at Skills Matter.

Mixing Native and Web Technologies, Oh My included three presentations/demonstrations. Great stuff.

Dave Springgay spoke about his experiences at News International developing highly crafted news apps which provide high quality and high performance on native mobile operating systems. He explained their use of HTML5, Android WebView and Java bridging to use JavaScript to inject content (mainly JSON) directly into pre-built HTML templates which are customised for each device, and which can be updated without re-deploying the app.

Jonathan Anthony provided an overview of the advantages of building mobile applications as webapps, using PhoneGap, using Titanium, and finally as native apps. He explained the latter of course give the best performance, better graphics and access to all the hardware APIs (with geo-location and camera being the most popular) along with the ability to have an icon on the desktop, but come at a cost due to the higher rates for developers, and the need to develop for at least two operating systems (i.e Android and the other one). He thought that for many apps, a webapp should be considered, due to speed of development and the cross-platform capability making them perhaps a quarter of the price.

Finally, Doug Chisholm and Clinton Smith described the capabilities of appsplash to develop cross-platform applications using their custom development platform.

So that's the technologies presented, but jQuery Mobile and jQTouch were also mentioned. Plenty to keep tabs on.