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tastejs / PropertyCross

Helping developers select a framework for cross-platform mobile development.
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Trigger.io implementation #64

Open chrisprice opened 11 years ago

chrisprice commented 11 years ago

https://trigger.io/

emmerich commented 11 years ago

How would we go about approaching this? Trigger.io is just a (self-claimed) better PhoneGap, with improved build times / development environment / cloud build service.

It mentions that it provides access to the native UI, which PhoneGap doesn't, but from my playing around with the SDK the only UI elements it supports at the moment are top bars and tab bars as mentioned here.

It also provides some enhancements to HTML elements (although only dates and times) as mentioned here., can't say whether PhoneGap does this.

I had a go at writing a quick prototype of the app using Trigger, but it ended up being the jQuery Mobile app with the PhoneGap calls replaced with Trigger.io calls. We could have 2 version of the jQuery Mobile version of the app - one for Trigger and one for PhoneGap to show the difference between the two and allow developers to compare the development environment of PhoneGap and Trigger, but the code itself would be largely the same, with only the builds and native API calls changed.

Maybe it's worth doing this anyways, as it seems that Trigger want to release more UI components and it'd be useful to have the project sitting, ready to be extended as new elements come out. Any thoughts?

ColinEberhardt commented 11 years ago

I see your point, that there is a blurring of the lines between the various frameworks. Someone already asked me whether we are going to add a PhoneGap version (which we sort-of already do have).

jQuery Mobile, because it looks pretty good - and is MIT licensed, will find its way into all kinds of commercial products. I am just tidying up the RhoMobile submissions which is basically jQuery Mobile with Ruby sitting behind it (and a massively complex toolchain, which requires almost 1 GByte of downloads!).

I do think a trigger.io version is worthwhile, even if the UI is not terribly different, people can grab the code and use it to compare the tooling, etc ...

Perhaps we should detail somewhere that PhoneGap is being used to build few of the framework examples just so that people who are a little unclear about what PhoneGap actually is can see that we have covered it?

emmerich commented 11 years ago

Yeah, I agree. In my eyes there's a distinct difference between tools such as PhoneGap and Trigger.io which allow you to create multi-platform deployments of an HTML5-based framework of your choice, and frameworks such as MoSync and Xamarin.

As long as we keep it clear that using jQuery Mobile does not mean you have to use PhoneGap, or vice versa, I think it's fine. We don't really need to say that if you're writing for a framework that gives you the choice of HTML5 libraries that you have to use jQuery Mobile, either. I would say that the choice of HTML5 framework used should be the developer's choice (exactly as it would be in a real-world scenario).

I'll get working on cleaning up the Trigger.io implementation, then. Maybe we should add a little bit more information to the jQuery Mobile implementation just to mention it uses PhoneGap, as you suggested?