Downsides of using Appcelerator Titanium (or equivalent)?

Question

At our company there is a huge push for cross-platform (iOS and Android) development. Appcelerator Titanium is being considered (and seems to be the only thing that\'s being con

Answer 1

Titanium/iOS specific answer, my 2c.

Native iOS vs Titanium

PROS

• It's nearly as fast as native for most things.
• The time needed to write a working prototype it's way shorter.
• If you need to integrate javascript legacy code or libraries it will work provided that it doesn't use the dom.
• Your javascript code needs to be well spaced and to include semicolumns where needed or the compiler will complain and eventually abort the build.
• You can use Coffeescript or any other language that compiles to js
• Automatic memory management is top notch, getting the same results in objc is always time consuming and sometimes debugging intensive.
• You can write your own modules in native code to extend Titanium's capabilities.
• It's open source.
• They recently changed their support offering removing the 5 app limit, much more affordable.
• You can change a view js code while running the app in the simulator, you will see the results when you reload the view you're editing. That's a boon :) (exception: there's no way I know of to reload the code in app.js)

CONS

• Debugging is a pain. Haven't tried out Titanium Studio yet, it might be a big improvement.
• Adding too many views tends to degrade performance faster than using native code.
• The Titanium Developer app on Mac has plenty of interface glitches and you might find yourself restarting it pretty often.
• In some versions the print to console debug statements are broken.
• You will often stumble into cross-platform abstraction leakage.
• Support on the forums is a bit light, many issues you will encounter are not big but still annoying.
• Need to pay attention to JSON correctness, the included parser tends to be picky. Using eval is always an option.
• Compile times and loading in the simulator are not that fast, titanium objc is pretty big.