MVC for Titanium

I’ve dabbled with Titanium before, and it seems a handy platform for building mobile apps with. This may be a useful tool to use with it.

Appcelerator Titanium + Coffeescript + MVC

So I’ve been using Appcelerator’s mobile development framework, Titanium, lately, and overall the experience has been good.

The benefits of being able to make use of my Javascript knowledge to build a multi platform mobile app that runs natively are huge.

There are a few problems with it though when you’re coming from Ruby.

  • getting a testing framework to work with it is a pain.
  • a small community of developers using it, so often when you hit a problem, there’s nowhere else to turn, you’re either the only one with this problem or no-one else has found a solution. Either way, you’ve just got to figure it out yourself.
  • Ugly code. Let’s face it, Javascript doesn’t look good.
  • Where’s the MVC? The example app provided by Appcelerator is a masterclass in how to avoid separating concerns and jam everything into 1 file. Unfortunately, it’s a pattern that I often come across in Javascript.

This is where coffeescript comes in. Suddenly javascript starts looking good and you feel better about using it. Combine this with a sensible folder structure and separate your code into a more MVC-y way of doing things and Titanium looks like a contender for doing some serious app building.