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

Chapter 3

Appcelerator Titanium Alloy Overview

ALLOY IS A new application framework by Appcelerator Titanium. It provides an MVC— Model-View-Controller—framework for developers to build cross-platform mobile applications. You are not required to use Alloy when building apps with Appcelerator Titanium, but after you understand the benefits of the framework, you will want to. Also note that even with Alloy, you can still fall back to the more traditional application structure in situations when you believe the Alloy approach doesn’t fit.

Alloy provides a clean, well-defined MVC structure for building your applications. This structure follows the convention over configuration approach, which means if you structure and build your app following a specified set of conventions, the framework is self-configuring.

NOTE

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) triad of classes (first described by Krasner and Pope in 1988) is used to build user interfaces in Smalltalk-80. Looking at the design patterns inside MVC should help you see what the term “pattern” means. MVC consists of three kinds of objects. The Model is the application object, the View is its screen presentation, and the Controller defines the way the user interface reacts to user input. Before MVC, user interface designs tended to lump these objects together. MVC decouples them to increase flexibility and reuse.

From an Appcelerator Titanium perspective, MVC means you now have a well-defined structure for your applications based on ...