Cross-platform app----analysis of Cordova,appcan,dcloud,apicloud four platforms

Objective:

Mobile development is a very important it area in the future, and cross-platform development will be the most important thing in this field. ----Guzhenping

A weapon spectrum

In foreign countries, the biggest is Cordova (phonegap,2011), open source in December 2012.

At home, in chronological order, there are:

• 2012, Appcan
• 2013, Dcloud
• September 2014, Apicloud

Two Cordova

Cordova is a product of the Apache Software Foundation. Its predecessor was PhoneGap, developed by Nitobi, and in October 2011, Adobe received enough Nitobi, and phonegap projects were also contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. Apache in December 2012, released the Cordova, until December 2015, the latest layout is 3.0.

The target audience for this framework is the native developer, which is designed to allow the user community to reduce the cost of native development through a cross-platform development approach. To do this, developers need to install the native development environment, configure the project, and build the app using HTML5, CSS3, JS, and native SDKs.

The advantages of Cordova are obvious, there are many frameworks, native interfaces, and support platforms that can be used. But, the foreigner writes the thing, after the company uses, appears the technical question to be difficult to solve. At the same time, its use of jquery Mobile, Sencha touch, such as the front-end frame, there are special effects start slow, slow page switching, data requests slow characteristics.

Three Appcan

Appcan was founded in 2010, 2011 launched products and testing, 2012 officially launched the brand, 2013 business model molding, 2014 developer registration about 70w. Appcan is not an open source platform, at the same time, the Enterprise version and some plug-ins are charged. In other words, Appcan is just a commercial company that sells software. We think: This will have a direct impact on the market share, closed source and no monopoly, so the outlook will not be too good.

Four Dcloud

Dcloud most of the products open source, the member units, HTML5 China Industry Alliance, one of the initiators, in HTML5 this industry has a certain status. Four products: Hbuilder, 5+ Runtime, MUI, and streaming applications are all products that make up and extend HTML5 features. The company's philosophy is to solve the HTML5 's performance, tools, capabilities, three aspects of the problem. MUI is a good front-end framework that performs much better than JQuery Mobile and Bootstrap, with the main difference:

• Different design ideas, Mui insisted on using native JS do, do not rely on jquery or Angularjs.
• MUI invokes the 5+ runtime's underlying native acceleration, faster than a frame without a native acceleration.

However, after all, Dcloud is a new platform, the development of only 2 years, the new product internal bugs also need a lot of testing. In its official community, many developers are also calling on Dcloud to refine documents and frameworks as soon as possible.

Five Apicloud

Apicloud provides native application function modules (device access, interface layout, open SDK, etc.) that developers can invoke via JS. Front-end engineers are responsible for page layout, UI presentation, and simple interaction, and the native module is responsible for performance and function implementation, both of which combine to form a complete application. At the same time Apicloud provides the function of the cloud database, the front-end does not need to know php,node.js and other back-end language, through the JS interface or RESTful API to achieve database additions and deletions.

But Apicloud's update is fast and the version is not very stable. Moreover, it is intended for people who do not understand the development of the app, and is not suitable for tech companies and programmers.

Six Weapon Spectrum PK

The above table shows that the positioning of the 4 platforms is different, resulting in the functional characteristics of their products are not the same.

Seven Advantages and disadvantages comparison

Cross-platform app----analysis of Cordova,appcan,dcloud,apicloud four platforms