Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

At Loopt we tried to do this. We made a hybrid app (Loopt Star), using web views for content and native code for tabs, Facebook Connect, modal dialogs, animations, etc. It didn't work. WebViews/Safari basically don't cache anything at all, and javascript performance is awful.<p>Out of desperation we even tried including a reverse proxy as part of the app to force meaningful image and css caching. Yes, the webviews were serving content from localhost, which was proxied transparently to our real servers and cached aggressively. Even that wasn't enough.<p>If you want your app to have a first class user experience, you have to go native. Maybe in the future things will improve, but right now users can tell.

I've been thinking about getting into iOS development but I'm on the fence about diving into learning objective-c. I'm a ruby/javascript guy primarily and I think I'd rather go the js route than objective-c, but I want to know what the limitations will be? Anyone have any insight they could share?

Using phonegap I created an app using Canvas &#38; javascript called Tank! (knockoff of atari combat). It was super simple to do and banged it out in two weeks on the side while working full time. I probably spent less time developing it that it would take to actually learn objective c to start developing it using that language.<p>The biggest issue was framerate, which when tracking 4 fingers at the same time, it drops down to 6-8fps on the original iphone. Tracking touches is more cpu intensive than actually drawing the sprites. I capped the framerate at 8 fps and slowed down the tank movement so that this effect wasn't noticeable.<p>The major upside is that you can test and develop in the browser every change you make without compiling anything, then dump it into the framework and push it to the device. This really speeds up development.

Tl;dr: jqTouch jQuery plugin, convert webapps into real apps, tips on HTML5 client databases, and accessing some ipod info.

As long as you're using web technologies why not make it cross-platform? It's pointless to use them JUST for the iPhone.