Titanium

Going Strong – Titanium 7 and Beyond

For nearly 10 years, Appcelerator has been making history. The first major milestone was back in March 2010 when we announced general availability (GA) of Titanium 1.0. It has been a long time by technology standards, and also a sign of maturity, expertise, and evolution. The pace of change in mobile has been breakneck since the first GA release of Titanium – mobile devices have come and gone, mobile operating systems have come and gone as well, and mobile app development has evolved significantly. A constant has been our JavaScript-based cross-platform Titanium SDK. A visionary decision to go with JavaScript and to provide a true native experience without compromises has proven to be correct and keeps our technology even more relevant today than it was years ago.

The Appcelerator acquisition by Axway in early 2016 was another milestone and 2017 was a year of focus and execution.  With a lot of hard work by the team, we are thrilled to announce our next major GA release, Titanium 7 (see Release Blog). On the back of last year’s November release of Titanium 6, we are settling into a cadence of one major release every 12 months and constant minor and patch releases in between. For most of you who use all our components and follow our blog posts, 2017 has been a year of releases every 4 to 6 weeks and hundreds of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes for all three of the platforms we support: iOS, Android, and Windows.

What a ride! A key part of our commitment to our community users and customers is to continue to keep up with the latest mobile operating system releases. For example, we recently provided immediate full support for iOS 11, and we continue to work on improving our Android 8 (Oreo) support. While the Windows Phone has essentially zero market penetration now, we are hearing more and more from our large enterprise customers that there is a need to build Windows apps for Microsoft tablets, which are gaining a lot of traction in replacing laptops. We have therefore made it part of our commitment to continue to support Windows in addition to iOS and Android.

That brings me to our roadmap for 2018 and beyond. First, we will continue to be fully committed to open source – not only will Titanium and Alloy continue to be available in a truly open source fashion with valuable contributions from our community members, but we are also planning to open source more components, modules, and our new Appcelerator Daemon, a Node.js server which will open the door to plugin-added functionality to improve local mobile app development.

We recently conducted a Developer Survey where we invited our active Titanium developers to provide feedback about their usage and their needs. In less than three weeks, hundreds of people completed the survey, and now we have validation for our roadmap and a very clear path on 2018 feature prioritization. This includes items that range from improvements in documentation, more sample apps, and more code examples to items to be addressed in Hyperloop, greater feature parity between iOS, Android, and Windows, and the modules with the most interest.

The latest software technologies are without question part of the roadmap. For example, Titanium SDK can be improved by facilitating the use of technologies like Augmented Reality; i.e. ARKit and ARCore support among others. This will make it easier for developers to add AR/VR and Machine Learning to their mobile apps, which will be part of our focus in 2018.

As part of the rebranding of Appcelerator Studio, we addressed a number of usability items, and we are going to continue working on the recommended enhancements from the Developer Survey. In addition, with the Titanium 7 release, we introduced a package to make it easier for ATOM IDE users to build Titanium apps, and we have plans to keep improving and adding similar packages for other IDEs.

App development, analytics, and MBaaS are our three pillars and are the focus of our product strategy. In the coming months, the Dashboard will have an exciting set of new analytics features ranging from improved usability to enhanced performance reporting and the GA of the Query Builder functionality. On the MBaaS side, if you haven’t tried it yet, you should check out the latest features of API Builder (formerly Arrow Builder), which has a new visual flow editor for orchestration. More enhancements to API Builder and Mobile Backend Services are on our to-do list for next year.

A lot of new things are coming as part of the Axway product strategy. Our mobile app development offering is a key part of the Axway AMPLIFY Platform and soon, in addition to API Management, you will see more products easily available in the Platform to complement your mobile app dev initiatives.

In summary, Titanium 7 is one more milestone for us to celebrate. It gives us a stepping stone for what comes next. Both Enterprise customers and Indie developers are our focus, and we want to continue to offer our great native cross-platform technology, as well as more features that bring you flexibility, scalability, and ease of integration.

Code Strong!