Boss says "We need an IPhone app", What frameworks are similar to Firefox, JQuery, templates, and data linking on an iPhone?

Question

We have a great software foundation based on Microsoft MVC 2, Entity Framework 4, Repositories, POCOs, Service and Control layers, C# Views, JQuery and html. Firefox pulls 100 records in 250 ms, drops it in to a template, links the data to the markup, and we sit back and drink margaritas.

Boss walks in and says he wants an iPhone app. I bet we need an Android app too.

What frameworks could we use to easily jump from our Microsoft comfort zone in to the wide, wide world of the Apple iPhone / iPad, along with a follow-up Android baby.

I imagine we could use our JSON controller methods to communicate. Is there some type of a client side JavaScript consuming app framework we could get a reasonable Website like interface re-working? They didn't like the idea of simply running the whole thing in Safari, which works pretty well.

Needs:

• Send and receive JSON objects
• Some type of template engine so we can pair up objects to markup, or at least some way to separate design from programming
• Something similar to JQuery would be nice
• A good editor with auto-complete and highlighting, something that compares to VS2010

It took us two years to incorporate design patterns, Agile methods, and Domain Driven concepts using MVC and Javascript. We may have two or three months to re-produce the same functions.

Answer 1

try to visit this site this could help you out without leaving the comfort of developing in VS

Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File

This is what I've used for my mobile Web Apps.

EDIT: They stop supporting the Mobile Device Browser File because of the huge file size.

EDIT:

For android you can use this Andriod SDK. You can use it on Eclipse IDE. Which I find it easy. Just as much as the same with VS.

For iPhone, in my opinion its better to develop it on OSX environment for native apps.

Answer 2

What is MonoTouch? MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple's iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices, while taking advantage of the iPhone APIs and reusing both code and libraries that have been built for .NET, as well as existing skills.

from http://monotouch.net/

Answer 3

What is PhoneGap? PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs.

http://www.phonegap.com/

Answer 4

Titanium makes cross-platform native application development easy Today you need to be in three places at once: Online, On-phone, and On-desktop. Titanium empowers you to create immersive, full-featured applications that go beyond browser boundaries and stick with your audience whenever and wherever they are. Titanium applications are divided into 4 main parts:

• The html/css/javascript code that makes up the core application logic and UI The APIs that access native device/desktop functionality, analytics or other modular functionality
• The language-OS bridge that compiles web code into native application code
• The run-time shell that packages the application for cross-platform distribution.

from http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-cross-platform-application-development/

Answer 5

My vote is to avoid the cross platform mobile app kits, and either just go with straight obj-c or use something like jquery mobile to skin a web interface into an 'iphone app'. Building a client to connect a web service via json is fairly straight forward using either the iphone or android sdks.

If you absolutely must use one of the multiplatform frameworks, Appcelerator (Titanium) is probably the best of them (I don't think thats saying much)