Top 10 frameworks to help you build cool mobile hybrid applications

【51CTO.com Quick Translation】Nowadays, developing a hybrid mobile app is much easier than before. Developers can write it once and then build mobile apps to major platforms without any additional work. The code of an application can not only run on Android and iOS platforms, but also be reused in improved web applications and even desktop applications (with some adjustments to Electron, you can make the code suitable for the desktop environment).

In this article, we will introduce ten very practical frameworks in depth to help you build a variety of powerful and cool mobile hybrid applications.

1. Xamarin

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Xamarin was founded in May 2011 as a software subsidiary of Microsoft in San Francisco, California. It uses the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and Common Language Specification (commonly known as Microsoft .NET) to implement cross-platform applications.

By sharing a code base with C#, developers can use Xamarin tools to write native Android, iOS, and Windows apps that have native user interfaces and can share code across multiple platforms, including Windows and MacOS.

Xamarin is a 100% hybrid mobile application development framework. It helps you save time on reuse capabilities, tool sets, teams, and significant parts of the code. You can modify the sequence of Xamarin and Android APIs, and design cool experiences suitable for Android SDK and GDK.

2. PhoneGap

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PhoneGap is the most popular cross-platform framework in the mobile hybrid application development community. From the backend Apache Cordova team, Adobe's PhoneGap framework is an open source distribution of the Cordova framework. With PhoneGap, you can quickly use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build multi-platform hybrid applications by reusing existing web development skills. At the same time, by using a single code base, you can easily interact with users regardless of their devices.

The core of Apache Cordova uses CSS3 and HTML5 to implement rendering, and uses JavaScript to implement its own logic. HTML5 supports access to underlying hardware such as accelerometers, cameras, and GPS. However, not all mobile browsers on all devices can consistently support HTML5, especially those with older versions of Android. To break these limitations, Apache Cordova embeds HTML5 code on the device's native WebView and uses external function interfaces to access the device's native internal resources.

Apache Cordova can also be extended by various native internal plugins, allowing developers to add more functions that can be called by JavaScript, which enables direct communication between the internal layer and the HTML5 page. Therefore, these plugins allow access to the device's accelerometer, camera, compass, file system, microphone, etc.

3. Intel XDK

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Intel XDK allows you to create cross-platform applications for different application "stores", including various web services, content-rich plug-ins, interactive applications, and applications that can run on any device and respond quickly.

In fact, this framework is a set of tools that support development, simulation, testing, debugging and release. Recently, they have made some major changes to improve your ability to develop various mobile HTML5 applications (including Apache Cordova) for Android, iOS and Windows 10 UAP. Now, they have also added various software development capabilities based on Node.JS, onboard and IoT.

Intel XDK also provides a real-time preview on the connected device while you develop using a variety of utilities. You can create applications by dragging and dropping, but this method also generates a lot of unnecessary code.

4. Ionic Framework

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The Ionic framework is a fully open source SDK for hybrid mobile app development. Ionic is built on Angular.js and Apache Cordova. It provides a variety of tools and services if you use web technologies such as CSS, HTML5, and Sass to develop hybrid mobile apps. Various applications can be built with these web technologies, then distributed through native internal app stores, and finally installed on devices using Cordova.

The Ionic framework is a 100% free and open source project, which holds the MIT license (Translator's Note: The MIT license is similar to the BSD license, but gives software licensees greater rights and fewer restrictions). A large global community enables it to be used for free forever. It has more than 120 native built-in device features, including Bluetooth, health components (HealthKit), fingerprint authentication and more plug-ins related to Cordova/PhoneGap, as well as various TypeScript extensions.

You can use the CLI to create, build, test, and deploy your own Ionic apps on any platform. The framework has an Ionicons icon pack that contains hundreds of the most commonly used application icons. The MIT license allows it to be used out of the box (OOTB). Since every step of compiling and redeploying the application is "fool-proof", you can develop your own application through Live Reload (Translator's Note: a web development auxiliary tool). In addition, it has native and very practical features such as deep linking and AOT compilation.

5. Framework7

Framework7 is a free and open source mobile HTML framework. It can be used to develop hybrid mobile applications or web applications with native look and feel for iOS and Android. Framework7 is also an indispensable prototyping tool when you need to quickly prototype your application.

The main function of Framework7 is to enable you to easily and directly use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build various iOS and Android applications. Therefore, the framework only focuses on iOS and Google Material design, bringing the best experience and simplicity of implementation.

The various practical features that Framework7 can provide also include: built-in scroll bar, software library independence, page transition animation, multi-view support, animation accelerated by CSS3 hardware, and page routing using a combination of XHR, cache, browser history and preloading.

6. Appcelerator Titanium

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Titanium has a hybrid development environment provided by Xamarin and PhoneGap. Since all applications are written in JavaScript, you must use custom XML and Appcelerator's API to support some native internal features. It is a cross-platform framework that fully supports Android and iOS, but unfortunately it does not include CSS and HTML. In addition, since its compiled code is combined with native internal Javascript, it has greatly improved the performance of mobile hybrid development.

Titanium is the best solution for creating hybrid mobile applications. You can experience it by downloading Titanium studio. Titanium's SDK is equipped with APIs for multiple mobile platforms and uses cloud services as the backend of its applications. It is equipped with various platform-independent APIs, so it is easy to access the phone hardware.

Titanium uses Alloy, an MVC framework, to enable rapid development of mobile applications. Modules created by Alloy can be easily reused in other different applications, significantly reducing development time and lines of code.

7.Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI is a hybrid mobile framework for Bootstrap and Angular fans. With Mobile Angular UI, you can use Bootstrap 3 and Angular framework to build HTML5 mobile applications. Angular UI is more like an extension of Bootstrap 3, but it has no dependencies on Bootstrap js library or jQuery (both of which have default dependencies with Bootstrap 3). All you need to do is use various instructions of AngularJS to create a cool mobile user experience.

In order to achieve a smoother mobile experience, the framework provides fastclick.js and overthrow.js. Those media queries that require quick responses are stripped out by bootstrap as separate files, so you only need to include the required parts. In addition, the components it provides, such as overlays, switches, sidebars, scroll areas, and absolutely positioned navigation bars, will not bounce to other places with the drag operation.

Mobile Angular UI is available under the MIT license, so it is open source and free to use.

8. Onsen UI

Although Onsen UI is relatively new, it is a strong competitor to Ionic. It is an open source framework with an Apache license. Onsen UI has a set of framework-independent UI components. You can choose or switch freely among frameworks such as Angular, Angular 2, React, Vue.js, and Meteor. Of course, you can also use pure JavaScript to build various hybrid applications.

Onsen UI has a powerful set of components that can be used out of the box (OOTB) for you to build your own mobile applications. Through its components, you can write various HTML5 and JavaScript applications and push them into applications through PhoneGap and Cordova.

The framework has semantically marked components that are very flexible and easy to use, while also being free to use in commercial projects.

9. Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch is a cross-platform enterprise-level product that can build end-to-end HTML5 and JavaScript mobile web applications. In the business field, it is the best mobile application development platform. Although Sencha has a wide range of products, most of its products are expensive.

For individual developers and freelancers, Ionic, Onsen UI and Framework7 would be better choices, but for enterprise applications, Sencha Touch is still the best.

The components provided by Sencha Touch have a more complete and native look and feel than other platforms it supports.

The core of the Sencha Touch platform is ExtJS, a JavaScript framework that can build a variety of near-native, high-performance applications. Sencha Touch packages and integrates the appearance tools required by mainstream platforms including iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Sencha also has a visual application generator that can directly drag and drop HTML5 code, and it contains a large number of templates that can be used directly. Sencha's various customized components can also be built and loaded into various cross-application reuse libraries.

10. Kendo UI

Kendo UI is an HTML5 framework for building cross-platform mobile applications launched by Telerik. It relies heavily on jQuery and includes more than 70 jQuery widgets that can be used directly. Of course, you can also integrate it with Angular or Bootstap UI frameworks.

Since many developers are already familiar with jQuery, learning Kendo UI is not difficult. Although it is a free and open source framework, it is still slightly limited in its functionality. You cannot get professional technical support, and some common widgets are also restricted by commercial licenses.

in conclusion

If you are planning to build a mobile app, choosing the hybrid mode will save you time and energy, and you can reuse its code in the corresponding web version of the application. Although the hybrid mode is not the perfect solution to all problems, hybrid applications are indeed a good choice for you to deploy your own applications faster and build application prototypes. I believe that the above frameworks will definitely provide you with a native application that is very close to the user experience.

Original title: 10 Frameworks for Mobile Hybrid Apps, Author: Pedro Fortuna

[Translated by 51CTO. Please indicate the original translator and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]