Building Cross-Platform Apps using Titanium, Alloy, and Appcelerator Cloud Services

Introduction

THIS BOOK IS a high-level overview of using Appcelerator Titanium Alloy and Appcelerator Cloud Services to build native, cross-platform solutions in JavaScript. There is and will probably for a long time be an argument about the benefits of cross-platform solutions like Appcelerator, yet competitors continue to enter the field.

First and foremost, Appcelerator Titanium Alloy is not Phonegap; Appcelerator renders native user interfaces and provides a robust and extensible framework of APIs to interact with the native device on iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. Phonegap uses the mobile device’s web browser to render the user interface of the application and a collection of modules to interact with the device’s native capabilities. It is an acceptable solution for some, but I choose to focus on Appcelerator in my business, Clearly Innovative, because I believed, from a business and cost perspective, that we could provide the client with the native performance at a much better price point.

This book walks you through the process of building a photo-sharing application for the iOS and Android platforms on the Appcelerator Platform using the powerful new Alloy framework. This application integrates Appcelerator Platform’s MBaaS (mobile backend-as-a-service) and Appcelerator Cloud Services to create users, store photos, and implement push notifications in mobile applications.

The Appcelerator Community is very active through the Q&A forums, specific websites ...