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I'm a front-end developer that is looking into mobile apps development. When I'm searching for ways getting into app development PhoneGap comes as first and most familiar language stack development method. It's really sweet that I can develop an app with HTML/CSS/JavaScript using PhoneGap APIs. But is PhoneGap scalable enough? How far I can go with it in making complex apps and large scale apps? Why and why not I should start learning Objective-C to get into app development? |
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PhoneGap is client-side, so scalability is fairly irrelevant - you always have one user on one device. As for app complexity, you can do a lot with HTML5 and JavaScript - There's no IE on iPhone, which makes everything a lot easier. There may be some things that can't be done from html or require the performance of native code, but PhoneGap has a fairly good plugin mechanism to handle that - you'll need to learn some Objective C, but not as much as you would for a full native app. As an additional benefit, debugging/testing is much quicker than with a native app - if you avoid relying on plugins too much you can just refresh your browser instead of building and installing to an emulator. |
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The answer, of course, is "it depends". Most types of application can be built fine with Phonegap, but you do not, for instance, want to build a high performance 3D video game with it. There are cases where a native app is more appropriate. There's a balance to be considered here, so you need to think about what an app needs to do before choosing between Phonegap and native. Time to market will likely be quicker with Phonegap as you can leverage existing web development skills, but typically complex preformance hog tasks like image processing, even if you can do them in javascript in PhoneGap, should be done natively. You can, however, make a hybrid application that would do some parts natively like image processing and the rest in PhoneGap. So, if you consider this, Phonegap is infinitely scalable! |
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