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Ok, I might bite the bullet and try a different framework for an iPhone app that I'm trying to port to Android. Built with jQTouch and Phonegap, it's just so sluggish on Android, with a number of issues such as inconsistent transitions and loading problems on newer Android API levels.

Looking for options for alternative frameworks that are more Android friendly, and importantly, not too much of a mountain to climb to adapt my existing code in to it as easily as possible.

As a jQTouch app, it's built with HTMl5, CSS, jQuery and Javascript with multiple RSS feeds, fixed tabbars, image gallery, Phonegap calendar plug in. jQuery Mobile would seem to be the most obvious choice, but I have found the tababars to be not quite as fixed as they climbed, (although maybe that has improved with the new release?). Are there any better alternatives?

dda
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danssker
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1 Answers1

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Like you said jQuery Mobile is the most obvious choice. You can also look at Sencha Touch, Dojo Mobile, Kendo UI.

Simon MacDonald
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  • Sencha and Kendo both look very good but are commercial - dojo does appear promising though - do you have any idea how it performs on android and given that its not as well known - does it have a healthy following? – danssker May 24 '12 at 21:17
  • Full disclosure, I work for IBM and we are big supporters of Dojo. I know of a number of groups internally using Dojo Mobile to develop apps with PhoneGap so I would say the following is healthy. Android suffers from bad CSS3 animations so Dojo Mobile is not immune to that but as long as you don't go hog wild with that stuff it performs well. One caveat you will need to be aware of, the aapt tool that packages your .apk ignores files/dirs starting with '_' so you will want to do a build of Dojo Mobile instead of loading it dynamically. – Simon MacDonald May 25 '12 at 12:55
  • Nice - I would have to agree that does sounds healthy! Appreciate the honesty. I definitely want to look into it further - although I had a look last night, and searching in vain for an index.html file has left me wondering how easy it would be to convert my app from jqtouch.... Do you have any suggestions for where I might start? – danssker May 25 '12 at 15:49