iPhone native application vs web application

I am pret开发者_StackOverflow中文版ty new to iPhone and spent some months on it but.....But i think my learning went waste when i read about web application for iPhone...These can be developed even with a nil knowledge of Objective c...

I am very shocked about that what is need of an iPhone native app....i mean iPhone developers are less required now?

please suggest........

Well it's not that simple. You can do quite a lot on the iphone with html5 and css3. Especially effects using webkit transforms are really impressive and performant. Furthermore, you can for example access the GPS hardware using javascript. On top of that it is also possible to write 'enhanced' webapplications using a framework like phonegap (http://www.phonegap.com/) that enables you to use things like the accelerometer or tab controls via javascript as well as makes your webapplication into a compiled app that can be destributed via the appstore (and used offline).

Combine these features with a framework like sencha touch (http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/) or the currently developed jquery mobile and you can write really usefull applications that feel like native iphone apps using mostly just web technology. Another benefit is, that these applications can also be ported to android devices rather easily.

But this all comes at the price of performance. Thomas Fuchs blogged some of his experiences in speeding up web applications for the ipad here: http://mir.aculo.us/2010/06/04/making-an-ipad-html5-app-making-it-really-fast/ Generally speaking it is extremely hard to write realtime or image heavy applications that perform smoothly on the ipad and it is close to impossible to match the performance and smoothness of native core animation effects. Furthermore things like file access, core data (some hacks exist) or direct access to the 3d hardware require you to write cocoa code anyway.

In my current applications i usually start with a bare-bone ios app containing some webviews. Then i sketch up features using web technology and implement performance critical parts using cocoa

I have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, there are two ways to develop applications that can run on the iPhone: web applications and native applications. Yes, web applications don't require you to know Objective-C. Yes, Objective-C is more difficult than HTML/CSS. But you can't do everything in a web application that you can in a native application. So no, native apps aren't going anywhere any time soon, and neither are the programmers who write them. They are no "less required" now than before.

It's the same thing on the desktop. You can write web applications that the user runs in their web browser, or you can write a native app in Objective-C. There is a place for both, but native apps aren't going anywhere any time soon.

You can choose to take the easier route, if you choose, but you won't end up in the same place as someone who has taken the time to learn Objective-C and written a native app. Whether you need that additional latitude and functionality is up to you. As long as you're making threats like "help me or I will leave this field", I suspect that very few of us will miss you.

A huge portion of possible apps that don't require the highest performance, special device hardware features not yet supported in HTML5, nor the security of compiled code, can be done as web apps.

But if you need the highest frame rates or a lot of number crunching, a native app can run from around 20X to over 200X faster than Javascript in a web app. A native app can also do audio processing and real-time video analysis, background VOIP or GPS tracking, use other brand new iOS APIs (MIDI keyboard support, etc.), and include lots of compiled libraries and other unix code that just isn't available in HTML5.

I've summed up my thoughts on the whole "native vs. web" discussion in a blog post here: http://www.springenwerk.com/2011/09/thoughts-on-mobile-ui-design.html

In a nutshell: You can't get around getting to know the platform you are targeting if you want to provide a great user experience. Plus, you shouldn't try to mimic native UI/UX in a web application, it will only disappoint your users.