Native and Hybrid Mobile App

About Apache Cordova™

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

When using the Cordova APIs, an app can be built without any native code (Java, Objective-C, etc) from the app developer. Instead, web technologies are used, and they are hosted in the app itself locally (generally not on a remote http server).

And because these JavaScript APIs are consistent across multiple device platforms and built on web standards, the app should be portable to other device platforms with minimal to no changes.

Apps using Cordova are still packaged as apps using the platform SDKs, and can be made available for installation from each device's app store.

Cordova provides a set of uniform JavaScript libraries that can be invoked, with device-specific native backing code for those JavaScript libraries. Cordova is available for the following platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian.

If you want to use Cordova in your mobile application, take a look at our documentation. It includes Getting Started guides, the JavaScript APIs reference and examples, instructions on Upgrading from previous versions of Cordova, how to write your own Cordova plugin, and more. The selector in the top-right corner of the documentation will let you pick different Cordova versions and language translations. And there is a registry of third-party plugins that can be used in your mobile application.

Apache Cordova graduated in October 2012 as a top level project within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Through the ASF, future Cordova development will ensure open stewardship of the project. It will always remain free and open source under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Native over Hybrid

 

Building native applications means using the native language of the platform, Objective-C on iOS, C++ on windows and Java on Android. The main advantage of native applications is their performance. Native apps are compiled into machine code (Dalvik byte code under Android), which gives the best performance you can get from the mobile phone.

 

Best performance includes fast and fluid animations as well as full access to phone hardware, multi touch support and the latest APIs.

 

Native development is far from easy. Despite the great number of resources that can be found, it may not be understandable to everyone. As code must be written specifically for each platform, the same code will have to largely be rewritten with little able to be shared. The logic may be the same, but the language, APIs and the development process is different. This process can be relatively long for complex applications.

 

Going Native

 

If you are new to mobile development and want to build performance-critical mobile apps and/or take advantage of native APIs, you would need a good resource on learning mobile native development.

 

 

 

Hybrid over Native

 

Hybrid applications are web applications (or web pages) in the native browser, such as UIWebView in iOS and WebView in Android (not Safari or Chrome). Hybrid apps are developed using HTML, CSS and Javascript, and then wrapped in a native application using platforms like Cordova. This allows you to use any web-native framework you want, and there are plenty of these.

 

The application development is faster, simpler, more rapid and the application is easier to maintain. You can change platforms anytime you need, Cordova lets you build your application for more than one platform just by one adding line of code. As for the phone hardware such as the camera or Bluetooth, Cordova has a large repository of plugins you may use.

 

The main problem with hybrid apps is that they still depend on the native browser, which means they are not as fast as native apps.

 

Going Hybrid

 

If you decided to develop hybrid applications, then you should know that there are two main ‘competitors’ in this field. One is Cordova (and Cordova-based tools like PhoneGap) and the other is Appcelerator Titanium. They both target mobile platforms but work in very different ways.

 

Developing with Cordova is just like developing a webpage. You create HTML, CSS and JavaScript local files, test them in the browser and then wrap them in a native web view with Cordova (you’ll still need native SDKs and development tools for this step).

 

Nextinfo had built both native apps and hybrid apps for our customers, which way to go is really depending on the requirement. Please contact us for more details