It’s all about enterprise connectivity, performance and new platforms
We have kept ourselves pretty busy here at Appcelerator over the last couple of months. Today we are excited to announce a major release for both the Titanium and Cloud products: Titanium Studio and SDK 3.1 and Node.ACS GA.
Titanium 3.1
In the 3.1 release we focused on 3 key areas: performance optimization, APIs, and new platform support. Please see the release notes for further details.
Performance Optimization
- We spent significant time optimizing the core architecture of Titanium, focusing on object creation, window creation, image usage and other key areas with broad applicability. For these integral pieces:
- iOS apps will run on average 20% faster over our 3.0.0 release
- Android apps will run on average 36% faster over our 3.0.0 release
- We have also released the ListView component which functions several times faster than the TableView component.
In short you should notice a performance improvement for all of your apps running under 3.1.0.
Alloy Updates
We have also been hard at work extending Alloy, our MVC framework. The amount of positive feedback that we have received on Alloy has been outstanding, and It is being adopted at a rate faster than we ever expected.
Titanium Studio 3.1.0 now supports the following features for Alloy apps:
- Content assist
- Debugging
APIs
ListView
This release introduces ListView, a new Titanium component to replace the existing TableView. ListView uses a data-oriented approach versus TableView’s view-oriented approach which greatly improves performance.
iOS EventKit UI Framework
The iOS EventKit framework, allowing access to calendar events and reminders, is now available from within Titanium.
Modules
In this release we have also released some new modules. Specifically:
- Newsstand (iOS): Publish a magazine or periodical with Titanium
- NFC (Android): Read NFC (Near-Field Communication) tags from inside Titanium applications.
- Facebook V3 (Android, iOS) API support
New Platforms
3.1 contains support for mobile platforms beyond iOS and Android:
Tizen
Tizen is an open source, standards-based, mobile software platform supported by leading mobile operators and device manufacturers including Samsung and Intel. It is now a full member of the Titanium family, supported in Titanium 3.1.0 Studio and SDK.
BlackBerry
Our Blackberry 10 support is now in beta. Please begin building apps for the BlackBerry 10 and provide us with feedback. In this beta release we believe there are the majority of features to get you started, including Alloy support, MapView, WebView, Database, Localization Support, and much, much more.
To use the BlackBerry beta, you must download a 3.2 version of the Titanium SDK from the continuous integration (CI) server. Note that the 3.2 builds have not received any testing except for the BlackBerry beta. For all other platforms, these builds should be regarded as unstable builds
Downloading 3.1.0
For new users, download Titanium 3.1 by clicking here.
For existing Titanium Studio users, you will be prompted to update automatically on the next restart. You can also manually check for updates by selecting the “Check for Titanium SDK Updates” from the “Help” menu within Titanium Studio.
If you previously installed the Release Candidate versions of the Titanium CLI and Alloy, that is, npm install [email protected] and npm install [email protected], or any -beta or -cr packages, you need to first uninstall these components before installing or updating to 3.1.0.GA. The release notes contain specific instructions on how to do so.
Node.ACS version 1.0 (GA)
Node.ACS extends Appcelerator Cloud Services by providing the popular Node.JS development framework on the middle-tier. Using Node.ACS, you can implement and deploy server services using JavaScript on the Appcelerator Cloud. You can develop connectors to enterprise data back-ends like Oracle or Salesforce for your entire mobile app portfolio, extend the functionality of prebuilt services provided by Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) or simply use any of the 1000’s Node.JS modules published by the developer community.
As a developer, you will immediately realize the benefits of:
- a single programming language (JavaScript) and development environment (Studio) for both client and server side code.
- a single location to host your business and application logic
- easy access to the ACS database and storage
- an MVC framework for creating scalable Node.ACS apps
- ability to update your Node.ACS app independently from your mobile app
- reliable, scalable infrastructure for your backend
With Node.ACS, Appcelerator Cloud becomes a comprehensive MBaaS (Mobile Backend-as-a-Service) that any enterprise can use for deploying the server code for its mobile apps. Node.ACS will be available as part of the Appcelerator Platform offering. Node.ACS apps can be deployed both on the public Appcelerator Cloud and a Virtual Private Cloud.
Getting Started with Node.ACS
To start developing Node.ACS apps, use the resources below:
Note: if you were participating in the Node.ACS developer preview, see the Node.ACS Release Notes for instructions on how to migrate your Node.ACS apps.
As always I want to thank our 450,000 strong community of developers for your constant feedback and support.
Source Appcelerator Developer
