After completing one project with Backbone JS and jQuery Mobile for the iPad Mobile Safari, it left me feeling that jQuery Mobile is maybe not the right tool for that particular job.
I have found the performance of jQuery Mobile generally quite disappointing. A lot of the mobile JS frameworks (that handle transitions, dialogs etc) seem to suffer from the same thing. Getting jQuery Mobile and Backbone JS to work nicely together seemed a little jagged.
I needed something like jQuery Mobile to handle drag and drop elements and page transitions (and dialog boxes). Backbone JS is great for what we’re doing, so we want to keep this in the toolbox. We’re doing projects only for the iPhone and iPad and doing them natively (with Objective-C) just isn’t appropriate in this case.
The recently completed project ended up using jQuery, jQuery Mobile, jQuery UI, some little plugin that makes jQuery UI work with touch, Backbone JS, Underscore JS… It all just seems so heavy for a web app on the mobiles! I want something powerful and smaller in footprint.
Sencha Touch seems to have great performance, but it does seem that you need to jump feet first into it and go the whole way with how it works. But maybe I have that all wrong? I’m more looking for something that plays nice with Backbone, is relatively lightweight and has lots of bits for building nice bits of UI for the iPhone/iPad (gesture support, page/dialog transitions, list views etc). Ideally something that acts more like jQuery – where I call it to do the bits on the DOM and stays out of the way when we don’t want it – rather than it being a dictating framework and having to play by it’s rules (like jQuery Mobile and most probably Sencha Touch). Also saw jQTouch… But this has been taken over by Sencha now, meaning that it’s dead?
Is there anything that does this? Something lightweight, stable, fast and reliable that we can use, in conjunction with Backbone JS, to create fast, responsive web apps for Mobile Safari…that still has all the useful bits of UI and transitions etc that would make the app shine?
Sencha Touch is indeed quite ‘jump feet first into it and go the whole way’ – But in my opinion this is worth the time. (I’m currently in the proces of ‘getting into Sencha Touch)
In my own search for the right framework I also came across NimbleKit (http://www.nimblekit.com). Nimblekit is in it’s stable release, offers the iOS UI elements and can be extended with any JS Library you wish. Yet, Nimblekit is not web-app based…
Because of that the choice comes down to jQuery Mobile (and wait for the further development of this library // performance optimization) or Sencha, a very extensive framework but a steep learning curve.
The performance of Webapps will always be difficult to optimize.