Mobile application development is in a crucial phase right now. With new models getting released almost every week, developing a mobile application that works with all these models is becoming a nightmare.
The problem with building native mobile applications seems to be duplication of code and effort and maintainence.
PhoneGap provides a facility to create a native app using HTML 5 that can be deployed in a variety of mobile operating systems. The main problem seems to be the richness of the UI that takes a beating. How can you create a mobile application that is rich and also doesn’t pave way for maintaining different codebases?
Last week, we got introduced to a couple of mobile frameworks one of which seems to be really interesting. Calatrava, a ThoughtWorks supported initiative.
Calatrava talks about developing mobile applications using the native API for the UI, but maintaining the core logic in JavaScript or CoffeeScript. A diagrammatic description of Calatrava from their site, is shown below.
Still at its infancy, it looks promising. You can read more about Calatrava from http://overwatering.org/blog/2012/10/announcing-calatrava/.