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Has anyone made experiences with both Rhodes and PhoneGap?

I tried building the same "Hello World"-App with both Frameworks for Android, and tested them on a Samsung Galaxy S device running Android 2.3.3.

In both cases, i used HTML5 & jQuery Mobile (in the same version) to design the UI.

The app does nothing but offering a link on the "Home"-Page which uses a slide transition to a second page. The Rhodes app needs longer to startup, but has a very smooth animation when transitioning to the second page. The PhoneGap app flickers and jerks.

Did anyone of you experience a similar behavior? And could you resolve the issues in the PhoneGap version? Could the difference lie in different browser engines / WebViews used by Rhodes / PhoneGap?

Schweder
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1 Answers1

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I can't give you a good answer, as I'm fairly new to Rhodes and Phonegap myself. What I do know is that RhoMobile uses Motorola's own build of WebKit if you have RhoElements enabled or have added motorola_browser as a capability.

If your Rhodes app was using Motorola's Webkit, I suppose it's possible that the custom Webkit build has been optimized for rendering the content generated by Rhodes, with its EMML and all. This is just speculation, of course.

Phonegap, however, relies on the system's browser and what it offers in terms of performance. AFAIK, it's basically a UIWebView object on iOS.

A really neat bonus of using Motorola's Webkit is you'll have only one browser to work against, across all platforms. (At least in theory, I haven't yet tested how consistent the render engine actually is across platforms.)

To sum up, Rhodes/RhoMobile sounds awesome on paper. I'm just hoping it will live up to my expectetions. Your "Hello world" test could be just a fluke with Phonegap, or it could mean that Motorola's Webkit is indeed performing better. Guess I'll find out sooner or later.

ximo
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