IONIC
The best framework to create hybrid apps in my opinion. I am using this to create hybrid apps.
Great examples are provide by IONIC community. There are separate examples available which you need to develop a app.
Good app structure. You can separate your html views, js controlles and js services.
Its worked on angularJS which is a plus point for every web developer. These days angularJS used in every SPA (Single page application).
No new technology required to work on ionic. Only we need knowledge of html5, css and javascript.
IONIC is one of the most promising HTML 5 mobile application frameworks. Built using
SASS, it provides many UI components to help develop rich and interactive apps. It uses the JavaScript MVVM framework,
AngularJS
to power apps. Two-way data binding, interaction with backend services
and APIs makes AngularJS a mobile developer’s common choice. With the
coming
release of AngularJS 2.0, focused on mobile, it’s sure to gain even more popularity.
The team at IONIC will soon be introducing an easier way to create IONIC apps with
IONIC creator. This will be released soon and will have drag and drop functionality to get started with app development in minutes.
Mobile Angular UI
Mobile Angular UI is an HTML 5 framework which uses
bootstrap 3 and
AngularJS to create interactive mobile apps.
The main features of Mobile AngularUI include:
- Bootstrap 3
- AngularJS
- Bootstrap 3 mobile components such as switches, overlays and sidebars which are missing in normal bootstrap.
- AngularJS modules such as angular-route, angular-touch and angular-animate
Responsive media queries are stripped out of bootstrap as separate
files, you only need to include what you need. Mobile Angular UI doesn’t
have any jQuery dependencies, all you need are some AngularJS
directives to create awesome mobile user experiences.
Take a look at
the Mobile Angular UI demo page to see it in action. If you want to dig deeper, I would recommend reading our article on
getting started with Mobile Angular UI.
Intel XDK
Intel XDK
is a cross platform application tool developed by Intel. Getting
started with Intel XDK is easy, all you need is to download their
application which is free and available for Linux, Windows and Mac. It
provides a number of templates to get started and supports a number of
UI frameworks such as
Twitter bootstrap,
jQuery Mobile and
Topcoat.
Intel XDK provides a live preview on the connected device whilst you are developing along side many other useful tools.
On a personal note, I think development using Intel XDK was the
easiest. It uses a drag and drop approach, although it does create a lot
of unnecessary code.
Appcelerator Titanium
Appcelerator’s Titanium is an open source mobile application framework that provides an environment to create native apps for several mobile platforms
Titanium is a complete solution for creating hybrid mobile apps with
all you need in one place. To get started with Titanium download
Titanium studio.
The Titanium SDK is equipped with a number of mobile platform APIs and
Cloud service to use as an app backend. It comes with platform
independent APIs which makes it easier to access phone hardware.
Titanium uses
Alloy,
a MVC framework to enable rapid development of mobile apps. Modules
created using Alloy are easy to reuse across different apps, hence
significantly reducing the development time and the lines of code.
Sencha Touch
Sencha Touch
is an HTML 5 mobile app framework for creating apps for several
platforms including iOS, Android and Blackberry. It has been in
existence for some years now and is popular among hybrid mobile
application developers.
Sencha Touch scores highly against it’s competitors by providing a native look and feel across all of the platforms it supports.
Getting started with Sencha Touch isn’t that difficult but in order
to get the best out of Sencha Touch, one needs to invest a considerable
amount of time.
Kendo UI
Telerik’s Kendo UI
is an HTML 5 framework for creating cross platform mobile applications.
Kendo UI relies heavily on jQuery and has a number of jQuery based
widgets.
Learning Kendo UI is not difficult, developers familiar with jQuery will find Kendo UI easy to learn.
Kendo UI has open sourced
most of Kendo UI’s toolset and JavaScript framework features. However
most of the commonly used widgets are still under a commercial license.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is the odd
one out in this list as it’s not a framework for creating an app, but
for packaging and releasing an app. PhoneGap is based on the open source
Cordova and is the commercial version owned by
Adobe. With a dedicated support team, PhoneGap is popular amongst many mobile developers.
You can use any choice of JavaScript or UI frameworks to get started with PhoneGap.
jQuery Mobile alongside
KnockOut.js or
AngularJS
is a nice combination. Once you are done with your code, PhoneGap takes
it from there and wraps it based on the intended platform. Applications
built using PhoneGap use a web view to render their content. PhoneGap
has a minimal set of web APIs to access phone hardware features and it’s
possible to write custom plugins to suit requirements.