TJ VanToll is a web developer, speaker, and writer living in Lansing, MI and working as a developer advocate for Telerik. He is an open source advocate that is on the jQuery UI team, publishes his blog open source. TJ is also the author of an upcoming book jQuery UI in Action. In this interview, he shares his opinion on hybrid development for mobile apps.
InfoQ: In your opinion, what are the most important stumbling blocks to the use of hybrid development?
VanToll: The one that commonly comes up is performance, and I would say the other big one is debugging, so performance has notoriously been a problem for hybrid development and I think that goes back to the bad or older phones that were out there, some older devices where hybrid development was just terrible, it really didn’t perform well.
In terms of how you can actually overcome that, you look at some of the libraries that are coming out today, things like Ionic and Kendo UI Mobile, there are some UI frameworks that are specifically designed for building these hybrid mobile UIs, they take into account things like using a fast click to get around the 300 millisecond click delay and building some really responsive UIs because if you go back a few years when you developed a hybrid mobile app you would use the exact same technologies that you would use to develop a web app, which works just fine, it’s still the web, so the same libraries will work, but having a library that is specifically catered to build a certain hybrid app can overcome some of the problems that have historically been associated with it.
To read more of VanToll’s interview click here.
