Titanium is an open source package that brings a bunch of development options together into one place. It allows you to take one set of code and deploy it on:
- Windows
- Linux
- Mac
- Android
- Iphone
Even better, you don't need to learn a new language. The development is based on a web approach so you can use HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, Ruby and PHP. Titanium has a facility to run a program for testing and it can also produce a compiled output for each of the platforms. Running a program does not require anything other than Titanium. You don't need to have a LAMP environment. For the compiled version, the runtime code is all included in the compiled module.
I have just started to delve into it so there is a lot that I haven't tried yet but here are some initial comments:
- The install is quite lengthy and a little bit complicated. You need to install the JAVA JDK and the ANDROID SDK in addition to Titanium. There are a number of other required/recommended installs but so far, I have only installed Python from that list. On Windows, you also need to make some adjustments to the Windows Path and Environment Variables.
- PHP is the newest addition and currently it is only supported for the desktop.
- There are some limitations on PHP. One of the small but annoying limitations is that Echo sends output to the console not to the output window. You can use some javascript directly within a Titanium PHP module so in this case, you can use $Document->Write in place of Echo and it gives the needed result.
- I haven't tried using a database yet but I believe that is supposed to work.
If you are interested in developing for the desktop or for phones/tablets and you want to use web-oriented scripting languages that you already know (for which you may already have a lot of code that works), then Titanium seems like a pretty good way to go.
