Mobile Development Frameworks

If you’re developing Android-based games or complex apps with extensive cloud integration, you’ll probably want to seek out native application development tools. These range from the Java-oriented Android SDK and Android Development Tools (ADT) Eclipse plugin to game-oriented engines like Corona to commercial enterprise platforms like the cloud-oriented Monaca toolsuite.

Mobile Framework:

1. Ionic

2. Phone Gap

3. Sencha Touch

4. Mobile Angular UI

5. Kendo UI

Ionic:

While relatively new, Ionic is arguably one of the most widely discussed mobile frameworks today. It comes highly recommended by Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass) and the well-known developer evangelist Holly Schinsky (Adobe). 

Ionic allows mobile developers to start with a proven, well-tested, easily extensible foundation to build upon. In other words, Ionic strives to bridge the gap between HTML5 and hybrid app development.

Ionic provides a solid basis for your hybrid app’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript and addresses many quirks of HTML5 development right out of the box. Thus, it gives software engineers a great architecture to create a high-quality mobile app 

Phone Gap:

Being an open-source distribution of Apache Cordova, PhoneGap is probably the best-known mobile development framework today. It is a kind of a granddaddy of cross-platform mobile frameworks.

PhoneGap supports a wide range of platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Amazon Fire OS, BlackBerry 10, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch and others.PhoneGap also comes with an accompanying cloud service aptly named PhoneGap Build. With it, you don’t need to install anything at all.

Another interesting perk of using PhoneGap is the PhoneGap Developer App. It allows you to develop locally, and then instantly preview the changes on devices running iOS, Android or Windows Phone. 

Sencha Touch:

Sencha Touch is a JavaScript UI framework specifically designed for the mobile web. Sencha Touch relies extensively on modern web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to deliver a native app-like experience.

Sencha comes with a large set of ready-to-use GUI widgets optimized for touch input. Among these, the more interesting ones include sliders, selectors, list controls, bottom toolbars, movable tabs, charts, grids, and some others. Controls are easily themed using Sass.

Sencha Touch also includes a range of built-in transition effects (such as slide-over, pop, flip, etc.), and has support for gestures like swiping and pinching.

Mobile Angular UI:

Mobile Angular UI is an up-and-coming HTML5-based framework, which combines the power of Bootstrap 3 and AngularJS to develop highly interactive mobile apps.

Some of the framework’s distinctive features include:

• Uses the powerful combo of Bootstrap 3 and AngularJS.

•    Offers essential mobile components missing from Bootstrap 3. These include overlays, slide-in and slide-out sidebars, switches, scrollable areas, and more.

•    Default controls are beautifully styled to accurately mimic a native look and feel.

•    No heavy dependencies such as jQuery or bootstrap.js. Instead Mobile Angular UI utilizes    fastclick.js and overthrow.js for a superior mobile experience.

•    Very easy to go fully responsive from mobile to desktop — just include a single CSS file and you are all set.

Kendo UI:

Kendo UI is a mobile framework specifically designed for creating cutting-edge web apps.Developed by Telerik (the maker of Kentico CMS), the framework is built on top of jQuery and currently supports a range of platforms including Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

Kendo integrates well with Angular and Twitter Bootstrap, right out of the box. Developers can seamlessly access Kendo UI via AngularJS directives. Likewise, Kendo’s widgets play nicely with Bootstrap by following the selected Bootstrap CSS theme.

Interestingly enough, Kendo UI also comes with support for server-side programming. This is achieved via server-side wrappers for ASP, JSP and PHP that are capable of generating Kendo UI widgets.