Which Mobile Library for iPhone App Development?

I'm a game programmer, so none of these suit my day-to-day needs personally. However, if I were to create a non-game application, the first thing I'd check out would be MonoTouch.

I already have experience with C# .NET for creating utility apps in Windows (for things like game level editors and I'm very impressed with the experience. It's very fluid and makes rapid development easy. I'd also prefer that solution due to the possibility of porting it to Windows Mobile.

With Mobile Applications, targeting a single platform is usually not the answer. The mobile market is fractured across many platforms and the large earners are either the killer-apps for a single platform, or the decently performing apps across multiple platforms and carriers: portability is a major factor!

I like using PhoneGap with jQTouch. I asked a related question over here and there have been a few responses.

I forwarded this question to our iPhone dev team and these are some of the answers I got:

"So far we use plain old Cocoa Touch, Apple's standard API, and Dashcode for web stuff.

If I understand correctly, all the frameworks you list are designed to allow you to develop cross-platform apps that work on iPhone as well as other devices, web or otherwise, programmed in languages other than Objective-C. iUI is a web framework that makes web apps look like native iPhone apps. jqTouch is a jQuery (Javascript framework) implementation for iPhone. PhoneGap is a cross-platform native development framework using HTML and Javascript. MonoTouch is a C#/.NET SDK for native iPhone apps. RhoMobile is a cross-platform native development framework using HTML and Ruby. TapLynx is another development framework that looks like it uses some sort of graphical block-building interface (I can't really tell how it works on a quick glance).

As far as I know we have used none of these. We mostly use the standard Apple tools.

A lot of those are for creating web apps (html and javascript) and/or not actually using the iphone sdk directly. You could probably throw a few of the game dev environments into the mix then like Unity or Torque, which both try to add a layer over the actual code to avoid digging into objective c too much. I know we messed with one or both of those a little bit to experiment.

http://unity3d.com
http://www.garagegam...orque-2d/iphone

We have used a few libraries, but not on the scale of a general framework yet. The three20 project is a good example of one that we're interested in, but haven't really had a reason to use yet:

http://github.com/joehewitt/three20/

Libraries we have used are:

SQLitePersistenceObjects - which isn't as useful now that 3.0+ has core data, but was useful when we were doing 2.x dev for simplifying database work.

TouchJSON and <another json library whose name I can't remember right now> - simplifies web service connections from the phone.

Flurry - analytics for tracking demographic and user information.

Those are what I can think of off the top of my head.

Those are good candidates.

The one I'm most interested in is MonoTouch, because it's .NET-based and seems to be the only other SDK that offers a compiled language for development. But it looks like everything is getting bound to Cocoa in the end anyway, which means you don't get the managed code environment of .NET."

It really depends on what kind of application you are trying to build. I'm a big fan of using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build apps because:

- You can use the same code base on lots of devices; not just iPhone
- There are tons of HTML, CSS, and Javascript developers and resources available

If you are going to build something with web standard technologies, you should check out jQTouch. You just include it in your HTML page and voila! - your HTML looks like an iPhone app. There's a quick intro video here:

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=6X4K2MQsSeI

If you want to convert your web app to an app store app, I recommend PhoneGap. Another intro video:

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=LcES5nIbMkk

Of course, if your application would be brutally difficult to develop with HTML, CSS, and Javascript this is not a good approach.