Toolkits / Frameworks to develop cross platform app AND web frontend

Question

I did quite a bit of research today without comming to a satisfactory conclusion. I need/want to build a service, that has both:

• a web frontend
• cross platform apps (focused on iOS, android and windows mobile)

I found a lot of frameworks, that allow cross platform mobile apps (stack overflow helped a lot), however I couldn't find any that also promotes extensive code reuse with a web frontend.

At the moment I'm favorizing the following solution: Split the web backend into a REST framework accessed by both the web frontend and the apps (developed with Phonegap to allow reuse of HTML5 / JS surface code where possible).

Since the project-team is rather small, code duplication should be avoided as much as possible.

Is there another solution/framework (I've probably overlooked), that would cater to my requirements more adequately than my intended solution?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The Javascript frameworks you can use for your web frontend and that can help you for cross platform apps are

1. Angular JS - Nice databinding features, dependency injection and MVC framework
2. ChocolateChipUI - Theming based css to look like native iOS / Android / WP8

There are other couple of options you can give a shot. Ionic framework

Answer 2

I work at Backbeam. It is a backend-as-a-service with great support for both mobile applications and web applications. You can write server-side logic and reuse it on all platforms. Here you can read an overview about the server-side logic functionality.

At this moment is a hosted service but we have plans to release an Open Source edition this year.

If you have further questions we will be glad to assist you :)