Choosing a right framework when developing a mobile application is really the first important step. Luckily, there are number of powerful and feature rich options are available. You can easily choose from these available options as per your requirement because some of these especially UI frameworks covers entirely UI component and some provide light app framework functionality. Some provides more comprehensive set of behaviours covering widgets and application framework concerns. So right choice is totally depend on your project needs.
Here in this article, we’ll going discuss some of these to help you to choose best suitable cross-platform mobile framework for your next project.
jQuery Mobile
jQuery Mobile is really the most widely used mobile framework. It’s a cross-platform light application framework, covering navigation and transitions between views smartly. It’s fully designed to work within a responsive web design context to target a wide range of devices. jQuery Mobile has wide browser support and theme roller to customize theme quickly. It has a long list of built-in widgets such as Toolbar, Navbar, Tabs, Panel, Popup, Listview, Collapsible, Collapsible set, Table Reflow, Table Column Toggle, Filterable and many more that surely speed-up development. jQuery Mobile has useful documentaion and demos which are very helpful for developer to add smart features in short time.
Zepto
Zepto is a popular light-weight JavaScript mobile framework. It’s fully compatible with jQuery api. You can easily grasp over it if you use jQuery. Zepto is smoother and faster than jQuery Mobile but still not fast as other jQuery derivative frameworks. It supports all modern browsers and has support for touch events and detection of the environment.
Sencha Touch
Sencha is a well known high-performance HTML5 mobile application framework. It supports MVC and has probably best documentation among frameworks. The updated Sencha Touch fully support Apache Cordova. Sencha Touch makes use of HTML5 and CSS3 to create web-based UIs for mobile apps that aim to rival native UI performance. It also has 50 built-in components such as Carousel, Slider, DataView, List, DatePicker and more.
Kendo UI
Kendo UI Mobile framework emerged as a powerful JavaScript framework for mobile web and hybrid mobile applications. It’s pure JavaScript and HTML5 provides both UI widgets and app framework functionality. Kendo UI Mobile is also part of a larger Kendo UI framework that can target both desktop and mobile devices. It has over 70 built-in widget such as AutoComplete, Button, Calendar, Color Picker, ComboBox, Date and Time Pickers, DropDownList, Editor, Grid, ListView, Menu, MultiSelect, Numeric TextBox, PanelBar, Progress Bar, Scheduler, Slider and more. Kendo UI Mobile also supports creating custom widgets as well.
Appcelerator
Appcelerator is an open, cloud-based enterprise platform for creating mobile applications. Its feature rich JavaScript framework likes Sencha Touch, but unlike Sencha Touch this one converts JavaScript to native code. Appcelerator is cross-platform; one code can be used to create iOS, Android and other mobile platform applications.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is a cross-platform open source framework that that helps you develop apps for iPhone, iTouch, iPad, Android, Palm, Symbian and BlackBerry devices using web development languages such as JavaScript and HTML. PhoneGap also allows for access to hardware features including geo location, accelerometer, camera, sound, media, compass and many more.
The-M-Project
The-M-Project is also a popular cross-platform JavaScript mobile framework. It is based on Backbone.js that helps you to create great mobile applications. The framework supports all major devices like Smartphone, tablets and even desktops.
MoSync
MoSync is another cross-platform mobile framework. It has a SDK based on common programming standards that support for JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Python and other languages. The framework supports a large number of OS like Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and more.
Here I’ve covered 8 best mobile frameworks that would help you to create innovative, useful and entertaining mobile apps. I hope mobile developers will find this list handy and useful according to their needs. If you know any other mobile frameworks which you think should be list here, do let us know by commenting in comment section, we would love to hear your feedback. Enjoy!
