Hello,
My startup and I are deciding which mobile touch framework to use to build our mobile web application. I'm having trouble figuring out the difference between Sencha Touch and JQTouch. I understand that both products licensed by Sencha and that Sencha Touch requires a paid license to use it commercially. Besides legal and financial issues, what are the differences, pros and cons between both frameworks.
Thanks.
Sencha touch is a little more complicated for those used to web design to use, in that it is almost a purely programmatic model (you don't design pages in html, you problematically add elements to a page). It does, however, have a much richer widget model and is a lot more fleshed out than jQTouch (it is also a lot bigger)...
JQTouch is much easier to get running on the fly (you basically design pages in div's on a single page), however, if you plan to have a lot screens you have to be very judicious about either breaking the app into multiple pages or creating your pages dynamically in Javascript as (at least on a lot of versions Android and on the iPhone 3G) DOM manipulation with a lot of pages tends to be where slowness happens.
Although Sencha touch appears to have a lot more documentation (at least it is certainly more organized and in a central place), I've actually found it harder to get a simple 3 or 4 page app running. The doc for jQtouch is kind of all over the web, and you need to spend some time finding the resources (Jonathon Stark's two books (iphone , android), the peepcode screencast. Now that the webpage reflects the code's movement to Github rather than google code, the actual git repository is easier to find (a fork of the google code used to be the first few hits on google). And now that Jonathon Stark has taken over stewardship of the project which David Keneda had kind of let lapse while he was working on Sencha touch, things seem to be getting more organized.
I don't know if this helps, but my suggestion is to try to write a 2 or 3 page site in each and see what you and your developers find easiest. For now, I am sticking with jQTouch, but that could change as Sencha (or another technology) improves. The important things is to keep most of Javascript code your write as library agnostic as possible...
The official jQuery mobile project was just announced: http://jquerymobile.com. Might be worth waiting for (late 2010) because of the number of devices it supports; I'll probably use JQtouch for simple apps and just wait for jQuery Mobile. Sencha Touch seems very sophisticated; if I had to build a complex, feature rich web app right now I'd probably use Sencha Touch.
Here is an answer from the creator of jQTouch himself, David Kaneda, who also worked on the Sencha Touch project.
Another point, that is not mentioned in his article, is that jQTouch is focused on small screens. As you can see on the jQTouch roadmap.
"Although Sencha touch appears to have a lot more documentation (at least it is certainly more organized and in a central place), I've actually found it harder to get a simple 3 or 4 page app running."
Completely agree with this, Kris. They really need to focus on simplifying their demos and target the user who has created simple jQT websites (5-10 cards which slide and maybe some ajax data or a form). Screencasts which show how to take JQT sites and move them into Sencha would win them tons of new devs and fans. I know lots of people waiting in the wings for jQueryMobile just for this reason alone.