Titanium SDK

The Titanium Mobile SDK tools comprise of a set of python scripts and supporting tools that work with the native SDK tool chains. The Titanium tools combine your JavaScript source code, a JavaScript interpreter, and your static assets into an application binary that will be installed to an emulator or mobile device. Fortunately for you, Titanium Studio will manage almost every aspect of this build chain, leaving you to focus on building your apps.

Mobile APIs

The Titanium Mobile API is a JavaScript-based API that gives you access to hundreds of native UI and non-visual components within your application. These APIs are split into various namespaces such as Titanium.UI (for User Interface) or Titanium.Network (for networking). This set of tutorials will take you through dozens of the most important APIs in the ecosystem.

Titanium Studio

Titanium Studio is Appcelerator’s free IDE (integrated development environment). You can use Studio to write, test, and debug your Titanium Mobile apps. Studio also has integrated templates and sample applications to make it even easier to get started creating your own apps. In addition, Titanium Studio will help you manage Titanium SDK updates, analytics, and module usage.

Modules

Titanium is built as a series of modules that extend a few core functions of the API. If you check out our API docs, you’ll find a list of the base modules included with Titanium. Yes, all those APIs are in fact modules that extend the core. Additionally, Appcelerator publishes a sampling of free add-on modules that extend this base on our Github repository. Subscribers have access to our Titanium+Plus (sometimes called TiPlus or Ti+) modules. Developers are free to extend Titanium themselves by writing their own iOS and Android modules, even distributing or selling them via our Marketplace. Mobile Web even supports modules, though they must be “pure JavaScript” modules rather than being written in Objective-C or Java.

Cloud services

Appcelerator provides various backend services, including analytics, that are included in our list of Titanium components. Titanium analytics provide basic usage-level statistics, including how often your app is used and on which platforms. You can even log custom analytics events so that you can track the use of specific features, like button clicks, data access, or any other type of user interaction. These services are provided transparently to the developer via the core API.

Going Native

The goal of Titanium is to help developers leverage their Javascript skills to build native mobile apps that run across multiple platforms. It gives you the tools to build apps that look, feel, and perform native. Furthermore, Titanium apps fit well within the native ecosystem of each platform.

Titanium lets you create iOS apps that feel like iOS apps. You have access to all the great Cocoa UI controls: buttons, tables, navigation groups, segmented controls, and more. Titanium exposes a large selection of native animations and transitions, and lets you easily define your own matrix-based transformations. Your app can launch background services or set app and tab badges. And naturally, you can publish apps meeting Apple’s guidelines to the iTunes App Store.

In the same way, Titanium also lets you create Android apps that feel like Android apps. You can define menus and handle the hardware buttons. You can start Activities and launch or receive Intents. You can put status messages in Android’s Notification bar. And when you’re ready, you can publish your app in the Android Market, Amazon Market, AppBrain, and elsewhere.