The Cluck Cluck App Builder

The Cluck Cluck App Builder is a small project that I have been working on since May 2011. This project came up as I was researching frameworks available for Mobile applications.

A Software framework is a reusable set of libraries or classes for a software system.
Specifically, they are used to implement the standard structure of an application for a specific operating system.

From my perspective, a framework have several advantages over native software development and does several things:

• It makes it easier to work with complex technologies
• It ties together a bunch of discrete objects/components into something more useful
• It forces the team (or just me) to implement code in a way that promotes consistent coding, fewer bugs, and more flexible applications
• Everyone can easily test and debug the code, even code that they didn't write

A software framework also has its limits and boundaries, which from a developer perspective, appears to be a major drawback from adopting it. As a Product Manager, I happen to think that it isn’t all that bad simply because by adopting the framework, the development team already knows what it is capable of. This in turns limits the “out of the box” thinking from engineers. I am not discouraging creative thinking but you can in fact be much more creative in solving solutions within a framework.

Several mobile frameworks are available today: PhoneGap, Sencha, Corona and Titanium are the most popular and fastest growing. After researching each one in depth and based on the current trends for mobile products, I decided that Titanium was the framework to further explore.

The main purpose of the The Cluck Cluck App builder is to educate and introduce Appcelerator Titanium to developers wanting to create a good, robust application quickly. The code generated by the Cluck Cluck App is fully customizable, and developers can publish the product we create or further customize it using more Titanium libraries available online for free. In short, The Cluck Cluck App creates a customized baseline content reader compatible with services you already subscribe to such as WordPress, Blogger, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more.

The Cluck Cluck App builder is an open source project dedicated to serve the growing community of Titanium users. In our next post, we will let you preview the great features of the Cluck Cluck App builder interface as well as a sneak peek into what the the application it builds looks like - Lots more to come, stay tuned -