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An open-source outfit that develops a software development kit to create applications for use on mobiles has announced a partner programme that will enable it to spread its wares in the emerging market.
Appcelerator provides an SDK called Titanium that can be used to build applications for the iPhone and Android devices and claims that coders can develop a proof-of-concept application within 48 hours. It can also be used to build desktop applications.
Scott Schwarzhoff, the company's vice-president of marketing, said developers could use Titanium to write once in Javascript, HTML, and CSS and publish an application for either the iPhone or Android devices. Support for the Blackberry and Palm Pre is on the way.
He said the underlying technology used "a combination of Webkit (the browser rendering engine for Safari) for presenting web information and native code (Objective-C for iPhone, Java for Android) for hooking into native functionality on mobile devices, like the camera, geo-location, filesystem, etc."
Titanium is released under the Apache 2 licence.
Schwarzhoff said indie developers, businesses and Appcelerator's channel partners - advertising agencies, independent software vendors and systems integrators - were all part of the company's extended network, helping to grow the use of its SDK.
For its commercial partners, Appcelerator provides the technology, training, and development support needed to use Titanium.
He said six leading interactive ad agencies, SIs and web ISVs – including Cimex, Computer Sciences Corp (CSC), Intridea, Razorfish, TMA, and Tribal DDB – had already signed on to Appcelerator’s programme.
Schwarzhoff said there was no danger of a lack of developer resources as the pool of talent the company was going after was quite large.
"We estimate (there are) about four to five million Javascript developers. That said, there are three things that attract developers to our platform: our open-source platform, an attractive suite of tools and APIs to tap into and lots of options for value-adding.
"We have well over 300 APIs that include native functionality like camera, photo, email, database, filesystem, geo, etc. We've just added full support for Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! Social for example. We have built-in analytics that measure everything in your app. And we're adding support for push notifications, advertising... it's all there in a single platform."
He said there were a number of small players in the field but Adobe, with its AIR, was the big boy on the block.
Appcelerator is an 18-man outfit of which 16 are technical staff; Schwarzhoff and Amie Doolittle, the vice-president of sales, are the two standouts. Chief executive Jeff Haynie was once a core committer to JBoss.
The company was formed three years ago but turned its focus to mobile and desktop applications in mid-2008.
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