UPDATED 09:38 EDT / APRIL 17 2012

Appcelerator Unveils Titanium 2.0, Highlights Cloud Integration

Web development firm Appcelerator has a tasty new treat in store for the 300k developers currently using its flagship Titanium platform – version 2.0 is available as of this morning.

The big addition is Appcelerator Cloud Services, which is also available as an independent platform for developers.  ACS is the result of Appcelerator’s earlier acquisition of Cocoafish, a relatively rapid integration considering the deal took place earlier this year.  Titanium 2.0 and ACS in particular represents Appcelerator’s entry into a broader mobile structure, which is all about transparency, the company iterates.  “We made the decision to make this an open standard beyond Titanium,” explains Jo Ann Bucker, Appcelerator’s VP of product management.

ACS is all about integrating the cloud into mobile as an interface that saves developers the entire process of setting up the backend required for third party features, narrowing it down to just a few clicks.  It supports Objective,-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha and HTML5 apps.

There are about a dozen of these cloud extensions available with ACS initially, spanning from user management to image sharing and customized data analytics.  This is an extension of the a la carte method Appcelerator first introduced last year, enabling developers to more readily pick and choose what features and services they want to include in their app.

Appcelerator offers iOS, Android, JavaScript and REST SDKs, ensuring cloud services can be integrated into mobile apps built with Objective-C, Java or HTML5, as well as any other third-party publishing platform.

For Titanium customers, ACS JavaScript APIs are already integrated into Titanium Studio, providing a seamless environment for both front- and backend development.

Cross-platform is the key word in the Titanium 2.0 launch, and a new software development kit pushes this even further.  A full HTML5 version is scheduled for early second quarter roll out, and today developers are getting access to the release candidate.

Appcelerator’s appeal stretches from individual developers to the enterprise crowd as well, and ACS fits in rather nicely in the overall picture. Just last week the company announced a big partnership with bespoke enterprise software developer GlobalLogic to integrate their resources.

The thousands of programmers working for GlobalLogic will be making use of Titanium, and in exchange they will help strengthen the platform on a long-term basis. We may see the fruits of this collaborative effort in Appcelerator’s next announcement.

As Appcelerator continues to flesh out the ecosystem around today’s complex mobile infrastructure, their framework becomes a more tightly integrated platform for developers seeking cross-device strategies.  And even as the mobile industry’s major players, from Google to Apple to Microsoft, address fragmentation in their own ways, the problem only seems to get worse.  Appcelerator anticipates an even more difficult terrain for app developers in the coming years, positioning its framework as a solution against fragmentation.  Leveraging platform-specific APIs, Appceleator’s setting out to “simplify and reduce fragmentation,” Bucker says.  “We’re focused on common APIs to build app functionality across iOS, Android, the mobile web and beyond.”

contributors: Maria Deutscher

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