Useful Frameworks To Develop HTML-Based Webapps for Touch Devices

Apple iPhone 4 and iPad

Make HTML-based touch applications. Easy.
In the last two years the rapid growth and diffusion of touch devices such as iOS or Android based platforms has forced developers and web designers to rethink the model of their own webapps for the new “touch experience” introduced by the iPhone in 2007.
During this period several frameworks have been released to help web developers implement quickly applications for this kind of touch devices. Here is a collection of some useful frameworks to develop easily HTML-based webapps that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet touch platforms.
Titanium – Appcelerator Titanium is a free and open source framework to develop easily native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. It provides developers with over 100 customizable UI controls for native tables, views, tabs, alerts, dialogs, buttons, support for geolocation, social networks and multimedia.
Sencha Touch – Sencha Touch is a HTML5 mobile app framework that allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touchscreen devices. It supports HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility, and optimization in developing your web applications.
Sproutcore Touch – Sproutcore Touch is the touch edition of the Sproutcore framework for developing HTML 5 web applications that includes complete support for touch events and hardware acceleration on the iPad and iPhone.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is another interesting open source framework for building cross-platform mobile apps with web standars (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript). This framework supports geolocation, vibration, accelerometer, camera, orientation change, magnetometer and other interesting features for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm.
Rhodes – Rhodes is another excellent open source framework to rapidly build native apps for all major smartphone operating systems (iOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android). It supports GPS geolocation, PIM contact reading and writing, and camera image capture.
iUI – iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing advanced mobile webapps for iPhone and comparable/compatible devices.
iWebkit – iWebkit 5 is the new version of the popular ultralight framework for easily creating iPhone and iPod touch applications. The current release has new improved features and is really easy to understand in order to develop in just a few minutes your own web apps.
XUI – XUI is another javascript framework for building simple web applications for mobile devices. No much documentation available but it worth to try it for not complex apps.
jQPad – jQPad is an iPad web development framework jQuery based with some features for quickly developing simple iPad applications.
jQuery Mobile – Closing I want to suggest you jQuery Mobile, the touch-optimized version of the popular jQuery framework for smartphones and tablets which will allow you to design a single highly branded and customized web application that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet platforms. The framework will support iOs, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and other devices. The framework is under development and will be available in late 2010.
http://www.zkoss.org/product/zkmobile.dsp
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/24/motorola-snaps-up-280-north-for-20-million/
Relevant websites:
280North – http://www.280North.com
Cappuccino – http://cappuccino.org/