What is the big deal all about the Hybrid Mobile Application Frameworks that support creating such applications? Let us now take some time in understanding these technical terms to gain a better sense of this area of application development.
Hybrid Mobile App Frameworks Introduction:
A Hybrid Mobile Application is like any other application that you should be found on your phone or on your hand-held device. A hybrid mobile application can be viewed as the best (or the worst) of both the Native and HTML5 worlds together. This can further be defined as a web application that is primarily built using technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript and then wrapped in a thin Native container which provides the necessary access to the platform features or resources.
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Now that we have some decent information about what these Hybrid Mobile applications are, let us now take a look at some of the most prominent frameworks that could be used to achieve these applications. The frameworks are neither numbered in order of their preference nor by the preference of usage, hence please go through all the frameworks and all the nitty-gritty details about each of these frameworks to make up your mind to choose the one that suits you the best. Without any further delay, let’s get down to business:
Here is the list of the most used Hybrid Mobile App Frameworks and we have taken a decision to limit ourselves to only 20 of these fantastic frameworks using which you can create the hybrid mobile applications that suit your business requirements without any hassles. We have made an honest attempt to provide as much detail as possible under each of these tools, hence take the time to go through each detail for your decision making:
One of the main purposes of this framework is to develop native applications over hybrid applications that run on a web-view. The coding for your applications will still be done via React JS and JavaScript and one of its features of it is that it is not very customized for beginners but its active community can help you resolve issues (if there are any) at the quickest and the earliest. With its latest release, they have extended its support to Android which is a welcome move as well.
Xamarin is one of the key mobile application development frameworks that has been employed in many Organizations for a very good reason, with more than 1.4 million developers in strong community around the world. The Xamarin platform is known to abide by the WORA (Write once, Run anytime) principle. Xamarin is known to make business mobile applications with the native look and feel.
Onsen UI is an open-source mobile application development framework that is well equipped to be used without the Angular JS requirement. It also comes with a very nice set of documentation that explains all the nitty-gritty details with examples of the common application structures. It provides ease of use for the developers to build applications by putting together the native looking components as well.
Related Page: [AngularJS vs. ReactJS]
PhoneGap is yet another open-source mobile application development framework and is also considered the simplest cross-platform framework. Creating applications with this tool is done all with Web APIs, which in other words is that it develops these applications under a wrapper native app shell and then implements them in the native stores for various available platforms. It also comes with the provision of a cloud service named “Build” that compiles applications without the requirement of any SDKs installed on the environment.
Ionic is a very prominent framework and is also considered the preferred choice of most developers. CSS portions of the framework are enough to develop native-looking applications. The complete potential of the Ionic framework can be put to use if it is paired up with AngularJS. With the command-line interface that we get along with Ionic, there are a lot of features that we get like the integrated emulators and Cordova based app packages.
Like the other frameworks, this is by far the most stable and independent framework – as this doesn’t have any dependency on React or AngularJS. Even with this, there is a good chance that we can make our applications look native with nice animations, and fine styled-components. This tool also requires just the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML knowledge for active development.
Next on our list is the Intel XDK, which allows an individual to develop cross-platform applications for different available stores. This includes all the services ranging from web services to plugins for rich content, interactive mobile apps, and responsive apps that are known to run on any kind of device. It is a framework that is known to help developers with almost all the tasks ranging from development to emulation, to testing and to debug. In recent times, there was a major change in support for all the functionalities that one would love to build mobile HTML5 applications using either Apache Cordova or any other of choice for Android, iOS and Windows 10 UAP.
There is a drag and drop feature that an individual could use but it creates loads of code, which is not required.
Appcelerator Titanium is indeed a better solution to create hybrid mobile applications and to get started with this tool, you can go ahead with downloading the Titanium studio. The Titanium SDK is strong enough with all the rapid development features of mobile applications. Alongside to that, mobile applications that are created with Alloy are also easy to use across different applications and hence the development time is reduced by many folds and so is the number of lines of code to achieve this. In the end, the compiled code is a combination of both the native and JavaScript which further improves performance for mobile hybrid development.
Mobile Angular UI can be considered a framework built with Bootstrap and AngularJS very comfortably. With this framework, you are assured to get the best of Bootstrap 3 and also from the Angular framework, in order to build nice HTML5 mobile apps. It can also be considered as an extension to the existing Bootstrap 3 without the dependencies of BootstrapJS libraries or jQuery. All you need here is to have some AngularJS directives to make beautiful mobile applications..
There are internal dependencies in Bootstrap3 as well which can cause a lag
Related Page: [Angularjs Vs Bootstrap]
Sencha Touch is yet another enterprise-grade framework that is used for building cross-platform web applications with the help of HTML5 and JavaScript. It is one of the premium choices of mobile app development frameworks in the commercial space and that too mostly constitutes the enterprises. ExtJS, one of the most powerful and popular JavaScript frameworks backs the Sencha Touch platform. This in turn creates high-performance applications with close to native application experience. Sencha is also known as a drag and drop HTML5 visual application builder, it has tons of ready to use mobile app templates. You can also create custom components and add them to the library to reuse in various applications.
Kendo UI is yet another hybrid mobile application development framework which is also an HTML5 framework that is widely used for cross-platform mobile application development. It is powered by Telerik. There is a strong dependency on jQuery and has around 70+ ready to use jQuery mobile app widgets from the word go. This can be integrated with AngularJS and Bootstrap UI frameworks very easily
When most of the hybrid mobile application development frameworks lean towards providing a native look and feel to the applications built-in these, jQuery Mobile has taken a totally different approach in delivering generic applications which perform in a consistent manner in any of the given platforms (Symbian, Windows, Blackberry or the others). jQuery Mobile is a wonderful framework for organizations that believe in the ideology of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) as it provides its support for various operating systems. This tool also enforces the belief that not every other developer is an iOS or Android fan.
Mobincube is a wonderful application interface that provides its users with the ease of developing any kind of mobile application. Mobincube is the best possible tool that is available to build native mobile applications for Android, iOS and Windows platforms. The ease of use of this tool is super awesome with just adding screens and adding elements you can build the core of your application.
If you are pretty new to this arena of development, there are 100% pre-built templates that could be used to make the dream application for your business all by yourself with almost no possible coding. There is a possibility that the developers can create applications for businesses, educational institutes, the entertainment industry, and the healthcare industry – so on and so forth. If you want to flaunt your technical expertise, you could showcase your development skills by adding your own masterpieces of HTML, and JavaScript for additional functionality and also interaction.
Longrange is yet another native mobile application development framework, which has components like navigation tabs, form views, and commands. The mobile application development framework is basically based on two principles – the mobile app development and also the shorter maintenance process. With the help of existing development tools like RPG, COBOL, or CL along with LongRange – we can develop a mobile application for a user community as quickly as possible. As LongRange is a native mobile application it doesn’t rely on HTML, CSS or JavaScript as a traditional hybrid application.
Has a broader dependency on existing tools for better applications to be developed in a shorter span of time
Qt is a cross-application SDK which offers a cost-effective design, development and deployment framework. This tool can be comfortably used by developers to deliver the best possible user experience across a wide variety of handheld devices. Qt is a solution that enables you to connect all the gaps across various platforms and also between the online, and physical experiences. It also enables you to deploy applications on Android, iOS and Windows platforms. It also provides you with an opportunity for contextual and personalized interaction with the customers outside of the core product itself.
The Alpha Anywhere is a low code and a rapid mobile application development/deployment framework which enables the quickest way to build offline-capable web and mobile applications. It can also be used to build cross-platform web and mobile business applications as well. It can be easily confronted as a one-stop-shop for all your desktop application development, web application development, mobile application development and also SaaS application development
NativeScript lists the next on our list of top 20 hybrid mobile application development frameworks, to talk about it – this is an open-source framework that can be used to build pure native mobile applications with AngularJS, TypeScript or even JavaScript. To be on the same page, you can write applications in TypeScript which further compiles to JavaScript and hence can be done. All that said, it provides a wonderful feature for writing and deploying mobile applications for iOS and Android applications from a single codebase.
Next in the list of our top 20 hybrid mobile application development frameworks, is Firebase which is yet another mobile application development platform which supports web, iOS, iOSX and Android clients. It holds the capability to cut down the time that is spent in the development phase and also ensures messing around with servers, data storage
Next in the line is a tool named Swiftic, which is a dedicated iPhone app development software. This tool provides an easy to use and navigate interface which allows any developer to create an application based on the outlaid business requirements. This tool is an abundance of features that make the business application more useful and also easy to use for your hands and your eyes.
Last but not the least, VuForia is an augmented reality software development kit. That allows developers to create applications based on augmented reality (AR) technology. This also brings in the usage of Computer Vision technology to recognize and also to track images, and 3-dimensional objects. This not only ensures a robust and reliable experience in a variety of environments but also acts as a means to cross-check the functionality seamlessly.
Conclusion:
In this Mobile App Frameworks article, we have gone through in detail what a Hybrid Mobile application is all about and also at the same time we have also extended our discussion to go through the best available frameworks that help in developing these Hybrid Mobile applications that suit your business requirements. You can go through all the advantages and disadvantages that these tools have in real-time usage and based on that you can make a decision of yours as well. Basically the decision to choose the framework for your development boils down to the following three reasons:
Who you are?
What do you expect from the development platform?
What do you want your application to be?
We have compiled all these details giving all the heart and vigor but before any decisions, we still suggest you go through the official tool documentation as it is very difficult to cover all the details in just one place. Hope you’ve got all the details that you were looking for from this article.
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Ravindra Savaram is a Technical Lead at Mindmajix.com. His passion lies in writing articles on the most popular IT platforms including Machine learning, DevOps, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, RPA, Deep Learning, and so on. You can stay up to date on all these technologies by following him on LinkedIn and Twitter.