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Developing With Appcelerator Titanium Vs Adobe AIR
By Joe Purcell
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-07-05
Tony Lukasavage has a great review on the differences between Titanium, PhoneGap, and AIR. Here we will focus on just Titanium and AIR. Another analysis which touches on the issue comes in two parts (part 1 and part 2. Titanium has the clear advantage over AIR in every way.
Titanium has better cross-platform support. Titanium apps are released with complete native support, unlike any other development SDK. Since Luke's post, Appcelerator has announced that it is now supporting a beta version for Blackberry. Notice in his review the difference between Titanium and AIR in their ability to use native functionality--Titanium is significantly better.
Titanium has better performance. It uses significantly fewer resources than AIR. One post benchmarks AIR as performing twice as good as Titanium in terms of memory. The fallacy in the analysis is a non sequitur; comparing two completely different programs speaks nothing to the frameworks they were developed with. Appcelerator's benchmark actually puts Titanium as using 1/10th the memory that AIR does. Theoretically this makes perfect sense--AIR is interpreted through a runtime environment whereas Titanium uses resources directly.
Unlike Luke, I wouldn't recommend Adobe AIR in any case, even if the developer has prior experience with AIR. The benefits of using Titanium far outweighs that of AIR, and the benefits are growing. Titanium has one of the best support communities of any development environment, and new features are being added with every release. Those who claim AIR is superior should not argue for such on an ad hominem basis. Certainly AIR is more mature, accepted, and trusted because it has Adobe at its back, but that implies neither that it is a better product nor that it has a brighter future. Titanium's ability to harness native performance and functionality makes it the best free open-source cross-platform development product available.
About the Author:
Joe Purcell is a technology virtuoso, cyberspace frontiersman, and connoisseur of Linux, Mac, and Windows alike.
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