Appcelerator Titanium Mobile is one of several phone web based application framework solutions allowing web developers to apply existing skills to create native applications for iPhone and Android. Yet, while using the familiar JavaScript syntax, developers will also have to learn the Titanium API, which is quite different from familiar web frameworks such as jQuery.

Appcelerator Titanium is sometimes compared to Adobe Air for developing desktop applications for Windows, Mac and also Linux

All application source code gets deployed to the mobile device where it is interpreted (the company’s marketing refers to this as being a “cross-compiler”). This means that during development any errors in the source code do not occur until run-time. At run time, the loading performance is lower, as the last step (i.e. interpreting the source code on the device) needs to be done every time the application runs.

Some developers have reported that although working with Titanium gives fast results, making Titanium well suited for prototyping, there are issues around differences in behaviour of the API cross-platform, stability and memory management, that made them re-write their apps in native code in the end. However, as of February 28th, 2012, there have been over 30,000 applications shipped to the app stores built with Titanium, including NBCUniversal’s flagship mobile app. Many Appcelerator developers cite the speed of development, native UI, and JavaScript skill set needed as reasons why they choose to use Appcelerator.

In June 2011, Appcelerator released Titanium Studio and Titanium Mobile 1.7. Titanium Studio is a full open standards IDE that is derived from Aptana Studio which Appcelerator acquired in January 2011. In April 2010 Appcelerator expanded the Titanium product line with the Titanium Tablet SDK. The Titanium Tablet SDK draws heavily from the existing support for iPhone but also includes native support for iPad-only user interface controls such as split views and popovers. Initially the mobile SDK only supported development for iPad, but support now includes Android-based tablets as well.

Appcelerator, Inc. also offers cloud-based services for packaging, testing and distributing software applications developed on the Titanium platform. The company expanded its product line in January 2011 by acquiring Aptana, Inc, a developer of open source tools for building web applications.

A query is an expression that retrieves data from a data source. Queries are usually expressed in a specialized query language. Different languages have been developed over time for the various types of data sources, for example SQL for relational databases and XQuery for XML. Therefore, developers have had to learn a new query language for each type of data source or data format that they must support. LINQ simplifies this situation by offering a consistent model for working with data across various kinds of data sources and formats. In a LINQ query, you are always working with objects. You use the same basic coding patterns to query and transform data in XML documents, SQL databases, ADO.NET Datasets, .NET collections, and any other format for which a LINQ provider is available.