News

AppGyver Says New Mobile HTML5 Framework Matches Native Performance

• By David Ramel
• December 4, 2014

Mobile development tool maker AppGyver yesterday introduced a new framework called Supersonic that the company claims achieves the Holy Grail of advanced HTML5-based hybrid apps: performance parity with native apps.

"Supersonic delivers hybrid app performance indistinguishable from native," the company claimed in a news release.

Hybrid apps are a blend of the pure native approach and the pure Web-based approach, providing access to more native functionality while using Web technologies that lend themselves to cross-platform development of apps that are discoverable through app stores, unlike pure Web apps. While hybrid apps provide native functionality, the different processes used to achieve that -- such as wrappers that provide JavaScript access to native APIs -- are generally considered to lack native performance and the exact look and feel of native apps. AppGyver now claims that has changed with its PhoneGap-based technologies.

"Supersonic introduces a new, declarative way for building high-performance mobile app user interfaces," the company said. "By extending standard HTML5 syntax, Supersonic introduces a whole new set of native elements previously inaccessible to hybrid app developers. This seamless interplay of HTML5 and native UI blurs the line between the two, and reaches performance unseen in the hybrid app space until today."

Supersonic uses Web Components to map HTML to native interfaces. "Web components is a set of rather recent standardized technologies (custom elements, shadow DOM, HTML templates and HTML imports) that makes it possible to package and distribute reusable custom Web Components," the company says on its Web site. "From [a] user's point of view, Web Components work just like ordinary HTML elements."

While the company previously emphasized iOS development, it has been focusing on upgrading Android development and now claims performance up to 3x better than traditional PhoneGap apps. "AppGyver's technology is backward-compatible with PhoneGap, bringing Android boost improvements to developers using any PhoneGap-based framework such as Ionic and Famo.us." In fact, the company's site says, the Supersonic UI component is a fork of the Ionic hybrid mobile app framework.

AppGyver said Supersonic is JavaScript framework-agnostic, but is specially optimized to work well with AngularJS.

"Building HTML5 hybrid apps that look and perform like real native apps can be really hard," said AppGyver CEO Marko Lehtimaki. "With Supersonic we're making it as easy as traditional Web development."

Supersonic is free, as is the company's Steroids IDE, with an AppGyver account.