Professional Mobile Application Development

Chapter 10

Getting Started with Appcelerator Titanium

Previous chapters discussed the ins and outs of native mobile application development with the tools that respective companies have available. This chapter covers third-party frameworks for developing mobile applications.

Appcelerator Titanium was released in December 2008, and has been steadily growing in functionality since its release. Starting with its Titanium Developer product, Appcelerator provided a single-point interface to run applications. It tied directly into your emulators (with some configuration) and let users publish to the respective stores, signing your build and creating a distributable package. As features were added to the Native iOS SDK, Titanium released a new, major revision, and each minor version included bug fixes and code to bring parity between Android and iOS.

Appcelerator has been bundling the Titanium Studio product as its main development environment as of version 1.7. You no longer need an external text editor to create your apps. Titanium Studio (a wrapper for the Aptana product that Appcelerator acquired) is a full-featured IDE providing a single place to handle all steps of the development environment and adding what previous versions were missing: a rich debugging solution.

Four versions are available for Titanium. The Community version is free, provides access to the basic API, and offers access to the support community and basic training videos. The Indie version has a cost, for access ...