9 ways to write native iPhone apps with JavaScript

John Resig writes about iPhone JavaScript development back in November 2008. Here are the projects he mentions. (status as of June 2010 in brackets):

  1. JiggyApp requires a jailbroken iPhone [offline]
  2. JSCocoa "full bridge" for doing full bore Cocoa programming in JavaScript. My take: kind of like Swig but instead of Java/C it's JavaScript/Obj-C. Written by Patrick Geiller. [online. moderately active]
  3. PhoneGap adds some native functionality (accel, gps, but no magnetometer) to an app . Also has great documentation - a free O'Reilly book "iPhone Apps" (which talks about cached webapps, too). Targets Android and Blackberry, too. [online. active]
  4. WebTouch is basically a "blank" iPhone app with a single WebKit instance. John likes this one the best. Code. Author. Blog. [online. inactive]
From the comments:
  1. Capuccino/Objective-J
  2. Use "Transfer and View" apps like Dropbox or Files - see this blog post.
  3. QuickConnect - an Xcode template. Code and blog. Development started 4 years ago?! [online. active.]
  4. MotherApp - generates an Objective C application from JavaScript (presumably). [online. active. commercial]
  5. Big5 is an app store app that somehow lets you tap into native functionality. Now open source at github. The readme points users to phonegap.
Not really sure what the state of the field is today, but PhoneGaps documentation (courtesy O'Reilly) is pretty huge.Summary: PhoneGap is the winner. But I really like the transfer and view concept, and JSCocoa for doing desktop development.

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