After sticking to native for any mobile development for a while, and doing quite a bit of non mobile work lately, I semi recently found myself in the position to give Appcelerator another try. All of my previous experience with it had been from the perspective of bug fixing already started apps. This project marked my first chance to start an Appcelerator project with a clean slate and I was excited to give it a more fair chance. From the projects that I’ve encountered in the past it was apparent that out of the box Appcelerator makes it easy for less experienced and/or less anal developers to just lump all of their code all together into an interesting pile of long hard to read code with no clear separation of concerns and then proceed to fall into all of the standard traps of doing so.

Appcelerator-on-Rails

After a quick (likely mid foosball) conversation on the topic with my Productive Edge coworker Ed Lafoy, who has been doing a healthy bit of significantly nice looking Appcelerator work lately, he quickly pointed me to a blog post by the author of Appcelerator-on-rails and associated github project. This quickly proved to be a sufficient simple option for easily splitting things up a bit into more logical order with decent separation of concerns. Even this simple separation was enough to greatly improve the appcelerator development experience. My first concern was that the project in github had not been updated in nearly a year with several outstanding reported bugs with no posted solutions which had me concerned about getting hooked on a dead project. Fortunately after posting solutions to some of the open issues the original owner of the project was very quick to respond and merge in the fixes which eased my concerns. If using appcelerator I definitely suggest at least trying this out.